“Hey, Mr. Dennis. Can you help me out?”
“Sure, Pascal,” I said. “I’ll help you if I can.”
“I do a lot of things with the Lion’s Club. Back home in my village I am the president of the chapter. Mother’s Day is coming up and it’s a really big deal where I live. I usually only speak to forty or fifty people at the Lion’s Club but on Mother’s Day all eight hundred people in the village will be there. I need some help with my speech.”
“How can I help you?”
“I need a joke for Mother’s Day but I can’t remember jokes and I tell them really bad. You got any Mother’s Day jokes?”
“How is this?” I asked. “Start your speech by saying, ‘The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman who was not my wife.’ You stop for a minute and then say, ‘She was my mother.’”
“Oh, that’s good, Mr. Dennis,” Pascal said. “That’s funny. I want you to go with me to my village in Sunday and see me be president.”
Somehow I let Pascal talk me into going. The closer it got to his speech the more nervous he got.
“I’m afraid I’ll forget the joke,” he told me.
“It’s a simple joke, Pascal. Practice it one more time.”
“The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman who was not my wife. Then I wait a little before I say, ‘It was my mother.’”
When it came time for the speech I could see that Pascal was really nervous.
“Welcome to the Mother’s Day celebration,” he said. “I want to tell you that the best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman who was not my wife.”
His audience gasped, “Oooh!”
He paused and a look of panic spread over his face.
“Uh. She was. . . uh, uh. Oh, hell! I can’t remember who she was.”
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