Tag Archives: UU jokes

Stupid Thanksgiving jokes

Q: How do you make a turkey float?
A: One turkey, two scoops of ice cream, and root beer.

Q: Why did the turkey cross the road?
A: It was the chicken’s day off.

Q: Why did the Unitarian Universalist turkey cross the road?
A: To support the other turkey on its spiritual path.

Q: How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to stuff a turkey?
A: One, but you have to push really hard to get him into the turkey.

I was supposed to have Thanksgiving with my Unitarian Universalist relatives, but I couldn’t take it. I left early. I didn’t mind having to join the Committee for the Implementation of Roasted Foodstuffs. I didn’t mind deciding not to have turkey so we could protest the poor working conditions of poultry workers. But after five hours of sitting in a circle trying to reach consensus on how to make stuffing for the turkey we weren’t going to have, I gave up and went to MacDonalds.

Told you they were stupid jokes.

Church choir jokes

I was at a singing event yesterday and today, and one of the other singers told me a church choir joke:

Q: How many church choir directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: No one knows, because no one was paying attention.

In response, I inflicted this stupid choir joke on the other fellow:

Q: If you throw the accompanist and a church choir member off the top of a tall building at the same time, which one hits the ground first?
A: The accompanist, of course. The choir member has to stop on the way down and ask the choir director which way to go.

Please accept my apologies for repeating these jokes here.

And here’s a joke about bass guitarists I heard today, included here for the benefit of Jim-the-bassist:

Q: Why did the bass guitarist’s kindergarten child flunk math at school?
A: When asked to count to ten, the child replied, “One, five, one, five, one, five, one, five, one, five!”

“If” (yet another parody version)

The senior high youth group led the worship service at church today, and they used Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” as one of the readings. I remembered that my dad had a parody version of “If” written for engineers, and I thought: Why isn’t there a parody version of this old chestnut for Unitarian Universalist ministers and lay leaders? So I wrote one:

If

If you can keep your cool, and coexist,
When others want to argue, fight, and shout;
If you can handle humanist and theist,
Balancing your own belief and doubt;
If you can listen both to blame and praise,
And treat those two impostors both the same;
And read church bylaws with a steady gaze;
And work for common good and not just fame;
If you don’t break, but like the Tao you bend,
You’ll be a UU [minister] [lay leader], my friend!

Yes, I know “lay leader” doesn’t quite scan right. But I didn’t have time to write two completely different final couplets. Instead of complaining, why don’t you write a parody version of this poem?

More bad religious jokes

First joke. Heard this one from Philip, who made it sound far funnier than it will sound here:

There’s this militant atheist. He’s such an atheist that the word “god” never escapes his lips, except to prove the impossibility of such a concept. One day, he goes out for a walk in the woods. He’s admiring the beauty surrounding him, and thinking how amazing the natural world is. Suddenly he realizes that a bear is following him. He starts walking a little faster. The bear starts walking faster. The atheist starts to run. The bear starts to run. The atheist starts running really fast. The bear surges forward, leaps on the atheist, draws back one big paw to deliver the coup de grace — and without thinking about it, the atheist shouts, “Oh my god.”

Time freezes. All sound stops, the leaves are no longer waving in the breeze, the bear’s paw stops just short of the guy’s head. A big resonant voice comes out of nowhere. “So at last you call on me.”

The atheist is astounded. “Well, I guess I can’t disbelieve my senses,” he says. “All these years I’ve said there’s no god, and now I see there is. I guess it’s too much for me to ask you to make me a Christian at this point.”

“That would be too much to ask,” the voice says.

“Then could you make the bear a Christian?”

“Sure,” says the voice. Time starts again. The bear draws back his paw, looks at it speculatively. The bear rears back on its haunches, puts its paws together in prayer, and starts to speak. “Thank you, dear God, for this feast thou hast laid out before me.”

Second joke, worse than the first:

A man is lying in bed in a hospital, tubes coming out of him, machines beeping ominously. He’s dying. And as he dies, he’s talking to the hospital chaplain: “Could it be? Naw. But what if? I mean, who knows?” The hospital chaplain is sitting there saying nothing, just listening and nodding.

A doctor walking by hears the man, and she pulls the chaplain aside. “What’s going on?” says the doc.

“This man’s dying, and he’s getting some things off his chest before he dies,” says the chaplain.

“Oh,” says the doc. “Deathbed confession?”

“No, he’s a Unitarian Universalist. Deathbed confusion.”

Told you they were bad jokes.

Joke

What do you get when you cross a televangelist with a Unitarian Universalist?

A television show that demands money from you for no particular reason.

Theological humor from a humanist

The recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist, that is, he did not believe in God. On a number of occasions, Vonnegut riffed on his disbelief in witty and thought-provoking ways.

During one interview, Vonnegut told this story:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association… I succeeded Isaac Asimov as president, and we humanists try to behave as well as we can without any expectation of a reward or punishment in an after life. So since God is unknown to us, the highest abstraction to which we serve is our community. That’s as high as we can go, and we have some understanding of that. Now at a memorial service for Isaac Asimov a few years ago on the West Coast I spoke and I said, “Isaac is in heaven now,” to a crowd of humanists. It was quite awhile before order could be restored. Humanists were rolling in the aisles.

“Knowing What’s Nice” from In These Times, 6 November 2003. Link.

But in 1999, he told the story differently. This is from the book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resemble solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

(I love the way he throws in that wry “God forbid.”) In 2006, he proposed another, different epitaph for himself:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC.

“Vonnegut’s Blues For America,” Scotland’s Sunday Herald, 5 February 2006. Link.

So of course the article isn’t really about his epitaph at all, it’s about how the rest of the world perceives the United States. A few paragraphs later, Vonnegut wrote: “Foreigners love us for our [blues]. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.” The epitaph, in other words, isn’t for Vonnegut so much as for the increasingly theocratic United States.

But analyzing Vonnegut’s humor is like analyzing one of Louis Armstrong’s solos. If you gotta analyze it, you’re never gonna know.

Another stupid church joke

One Sunday morning, a fellow comes home from attending his Unitarian Universalist church. His spouse, who did not go to church that day, asks, “So, what did you get for a sermon this morning?” The fellow says, “It was shocking, absolutely shocking! I can’t believe our minister would preach about something so shocking.” To which his spouse replies, with a certain amount of interest, “What, did the old bird preach another sermon about sex?” “No, no,” says the fellow disgustedly, “he did his annual sermon about money for the pledge drive.”

A preachy little footnote: Unitarian Universalists give less money as a percentage of income to their faith (1.5%) than any other U.S. denomination except Roman Catholics (1%).

Another church joke

I’ve spent far too long writing and rewriting this week’s sermon. Time for bed, but before I go, here’s a joke I heard today from Rev. Eric Cherry of Unity Church in North Easton:

The minister droned on and on with the sermon, putting half the congregation to sleep. At last he finished, and at the close of the worship service he announced, “Will all Board members please join me for a meeting after the final hymn.”

Instead of going to coffee hour, the Board members dutifully followed the minister into a meeting room off the parish hall. Just as the door was about to close, another man walked in, someone no one knew. The minister said, “Perhaps you didn’t understand, this meeting is for Board members of the church.”

“Oh,” said the man, “I’m a bored member of the church, I’ve never been so bored in my life as I was during that sermon.”

Another stupid Unitarian Universalist joke

So I heard this stupid joke about Unitarian Universalists, which, stupid as it may be, I can’t resist passing along to you.

So these two Unitarian Universalists die, and next thing they know they find themselves standing in line in front of these large pearlescent gates. Somewhat to their surprise, they’re actually waiting in line to talk with St. Peter. When their turn finally comes, St. Pete asks them what religion they used to be, and they say, “Unitarian Universalists.”

“Hmm, Unitarian Universalists,” replies St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, because you did so much social justice work on earth, you can go into heaven.”

The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?”

“Oh yes,” says St. Peter.

So they step out of line, and start picketing the gates of heaven, carrying signs that read, “St. Peter Unfair to the Damned!” and “Give the Damned a Second Chance!”

Probably they started chanting “One two three four/ Stay away from heaven’s door!/ Five six seven eight/ We are going to close hell’s gates!” — and handing out leaflets depicting St. Peter with a big red “X” over his face — but the joke doesn’t say one way or the other. And stop complaining — I told you it was a stupid joke.