YA WANNA BUY A WATCH?

Every now and then I get silly. I do something that amuses me and I do it for my sake. Sometimes this makes TLW (The Little Woman) cringe, but hey, I only live once.

There is an old Jewish routine that goes back to the Jewish circuit in the mountains, a traveler comes upon a farm and wants to befriend the farmer, maybe get a meal out of him and decides to use comedy on the farmer.

“Excuse me sir, how do you sell a chicken to a deaf man?” asks the traveler.

The farmer looks at the traveler and shrugs his shoulder: “I don’t know, how?”

At the top of his lungs the traveler yells: “YOU WANNA BUY A CHICKEN?”

Silly joke and very old, but it still makes me laugh. The joke was told to me by a guy named; Sam Schwartz, who ran the Production Studio where I once labored for a famous contest company many years ago. In fact it was Sam that taught me so much about Jewish humor and how very relevant it can be in certain situations. Another old Jewish joke from the Borsch Belt: Question: Why do husbands die before their wives? Answer: They want to!

So I decided to go to the Mall one day last week and as I wandered through Macy’s on my way to the Apple Store, my mind is wandering remembering the old joke having just seen it on the Internet, and I see this gentleman who reminds me of Sam and the jokes. I go through the jewelry section and behind the counter is the young woman bored out of her mind waiting for her first customer of the day. She is staring out into the store with her arms folded and her hip leaning into the display case filled with watches. Not being a very mature person and sometimes should be supervised, it struck me that I needed to convey the essence of the chicken joke.

Going up to the salesgirl I ask:

“How do you sell a watch to a deaf person?”

See looks at me without saying anything, but her eyes are focused on me, not moving from her pose. So I told her:

“DO YOU WANNA BUY A WATCH?”

Taking off and a little red in the face for yelling, as I got to cosmetics, I can hear her laughing out loud in the almost empty store!

The moral is: Don’t tell me any jokes,