Bar Jokes
A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”
And the horse says, “There are cities where the concrete seems to go on forever, so much gray it makes you dizzy, but the people there still believe in suburbs.”
A man walks into a bar and says, “Shaken, not stirred.”
And the bartender says, “Sometimes, when it’s a slow night, I think about those vacant November days, when the leaves are an ancient language on the sidewalk, a prayer to something old and blind. I think about how this joke would look, boarded up and rotting.”
And the man says, “That bad, huh?”
A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a bar.
“I once had a woman come into confession,” begins the priest. “And she told me that, in her twenties, she’d gotten lost while spelunking in Kentucky. She wandered around in the dark by herself until her headlamp died. And then she just sat there, waiting to be rescued, listening to dripping water and eyeless cave things scurrying around. She said she heard God tell her a joke in that dark, under all that weight. And I believe her.”
“I’ll do you one better,” replies the rabbi. “I knew this girl, this little girl, who would come to our temple every week. She was the sweetest kid, raised by a single mom. She grows up, dates a guy from our temple. I do their wedding myself. At the ceremony, she tells me that, for her whole childhood, she thought I was God, the God we were always talking about in prayers. ‘I didn’t figure it out until I was, like, fourteen,’ she said. There was a lot of ice that winter, overflowing the gutters and coating the streets like saliva.”
“I don’t really get it,” the atheist says.
The bartender doesn’t say anything.