Murray Townsend

I ran into this guy recently who I knew from years ago, but he looked a lot different. He had a big orange head.

Okay, it's just a joke, it didn't really happen, but pretend it did.

I was of course astonished, so I asked him, "How did you get that big orange head?"

"Funny thing," he told me. "I was walking along the beach and found one of those genie bottles. I rubbed it, the genie came out and gave me three wishes. The first wish was for a billion dollars, which I got, then I wished for the biggest mansion in the world, which I also got."

Yeah, I said, but what about the orange head?

"Well, for my third wish -- and here's where I think I went wrong -- I wished for a big orange head."

I don't know what it is about that joke, but I can't stop laughing. I had to stop writing it here halfway through because I was laughing so hard. I'm still laughing.

Maybe you don't think it's so funny, but I do.

There are a couple movie scenes I still get hysterical over.

Two of them are in Dumb and Dumber. One is where they make a snowman and one of the dumb guys doesn't know where to put the carrot, so he puts it in the wrong spot -- you can guess where.

The other is when one of the dumb guys is playfully tossing snow with a girl, but it escalates until he's whipping snowballs at her as hard as he can.

Maybe you have to see them, but like I said some things just strike you as funny and that's the way it is.

It's like when I used to cross the border to play poker with my youngest daughter. The border guard would always ask how much money we had on us.

We didn't have any, we'd use the bank machine on the other side of the border so we wouldn't have to go to the bank machine here and then get it exchanged. Each time we would answer, "Nothing yet."

So, after a few times, and pretty much anticipating what was going to be asked and answered, it got to be so funny beforehand that I could barely get the words out of my mouth without bursting out laughing, which is not a good thing to do at the border.

Speaking of laughing, you may have heard that George Carlin died this week. When I was a teenager we would listen to his albums over and over again, and they'd be funny each time.

Probably his most famous bit was the seven words you can't say on television. You still can't hear them on most television stations, but I bet a lot of people from my generation know those seven words in the exact proper order.

I haven't listened to that album in probably 30 years, but I can still rhyme off those words just like that. I don't know if that's good or bad.

The other comedy albums we listened to were Cheech and Chong. Over and over. "Dave? Dave's not here." We all knew what was coming next, but it was still funny.

Just like the big orange head joke.