Punchlines

DAVE LETTERMAN'S TOP 1010. Tells you to open your eyes and say "Ahh."9. Reeks of ether.8. Keeps calling you "Four Eyes."7. Asks which image is better: him with or without a moustache.6. Says, "Be right back," then walks into a wall.5. Instead of eye chart, has you read a filthy limerick.4. Every couple minutes, tells you to spit in a bowl.3. Promises if surgery fails, a new eye will grow in.2. Dilates your ears.1. You complain of dry eyes; he moistens them with his tongue.

Irish oddity

An American tourist is sitting a bar in Ireland, sipping his pint, when suddenly a man wearing a full-body white Morphsuit, tweed jacket and a deerstalker hat walks in. He walks straight up the wall, across the ceiling and back down the wall toward the bar.

He points towards the Jack Daniel's and puts up two fingers. The barman pours a double.

In one swift motion, he downs it, walks back up the wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall and out the door.

The tourist turns to the barman and says, "That was a bit odd, wasn't it?"

The barman says, "Yeah, he usually has a Guinness."

Essay time

These tortured analogies are often attributed to English essays written by high-school students and collected by their teachers. Snopes.com says they're actually entries in a Washington Post humor contest.

• When she tried to sing, it sounded like a walrus giving birth to farm equipment.

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

• He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

• He was as tall as a 6-foot, 3-inch tree.

• The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

• McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

• From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.

• Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

• They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

• He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

• Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

• Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

• The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

• It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

• He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

• Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

One out of three

Interviewer: Describe yourself in three words.

Interviewee: Lazy.

Title tracks

• When my wife said she was leaving because of my obsession with The Monkees, I thought she was joking. Then I saw her face.

• My girlfriend told me to stop making Linkin Park references. But in the end, it didn't even matter.

• Rick Astley will let you borrow any movie from his Pixar collection, except one. He's never gonna give you Up.

• Led Zeppelin, you shook me, but AC/DC shook me all night long.

• Did you hear that Celine Dion is now an organ donor? When she dies, her heart will go on.

• What did Kenny Rogers say when one of the tires fell off his car? You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel.

• Why did Dolly Parton quit her day job? She was tired of working 9 to 5.

• Did you hear Willie Nelson got hit by a car? He was playing on the road again.

• Fans of Creedence Clearwater Revival have opened a museum dedicated to the group. Every effort is made to make visitors comfortable. You gotta go? No problem. Signs everywhere inform you, "There's a bathroom on the right."

Weed killer

A botanist goes into a shop and asks, "Do you have any of that inhibitor of 3-phosphoshikimate-carboxyvinyl transferase?"

The shopkeeper says, "You mean Roundup, the weed killer?"

The botanist says, "Yeah, that's it. I can never remember that dang name."

Laugh Lines is compiled from various sources, including reader submissions and websites. Origins are included when known.

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