Hi, Anton Shepelev!
I read your message from 09.06.2024 21:07
"He told me an anecdote, and I didn't laugh."
An anecdote is a personal and unverified story. The word you
want is `joke'.
Jokes IMHO are very short. Long jokes are bad joke;
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Why do French people eat snails?
They don't like fast food.
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Anecdotes are rather short humorous stories
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A Collection of Intermediate Anecdotes in American English
Jim walked into a store which had a sign outside: "Second-hand clothes bought and sold." He was carrying an old pair of pants and asked the owner of the store, "How much will you give me for these?" The man looked at them and then said rudely, "Two dollars."
"What!" said Jim." I had guessed they were worth at least five."
"No," said the man, "they aren't worth a penny more than two dollars."
"Are you sure?" asked Jim.
"Very sure," said the man.
"Well," said Jim, taking two dollars out of his pocket, "here's your money.
These pants were hanging outside your store with a price tag that said $6.50, but I thought that was too much money, so I wanted to make sure how much they were really worth."
Then he walked out of the store with the pair of pants and disappeared before the surprised store owner could think of anything to say.
***
Mrs.
Green was the manager of a large company, and she frequently had to have meetings with other business people in a room in her building.
She did not smoke at all, but many of the other people at the meetings did, so she often found the air during the meetings terrible.
One day, after an hour, her throat and eyes were sore and she was coughing a lot, so she called a big air-conditioning company and asked them to work out how much it would cost to keep the air of the meeting room in her building really clean.
After a few days the air-conditioning company sent in two estimates for Mrs.
Green to choose from.
One estimate was for $5,000 to put in new air-conditioning, and the other was for $5.00 for a sign which said, NO SMOKING.
***
A lot of boys and girls in Western countries are wearing the same kinds of clothes, and many of them have long hair, so it is often difficult to tell whether they are boys or girls.
One day, an old gentleman went for a walk in a park in Washington, and when he was tired he sat down on a bench.
A young person was standing on the other side of the pond.
"My goodness!" the old man said to the person who was sitting next to him on the bench.
"Do you see that person with the loose pants and long hair?
Is it a boy or a girl?"
"A girl," said his neighbor.
"She's my daughter."
"Oh!" the old gentleman said quickly.
"Please forgive me, I didn't know that you were her mother."
"I'm not," said the other person, "I'm her father."
***
A young boy was playing with a ball in the street.
He kicked it too hard, and it broke the window of a house and fell inside.
A lady came to the window with the ball and shouted at the young boy, so he ran away, but he still wanted his ball back.
A few minutes later he returned and knocked at the door of the house, and when the lady answered it, he said, "My father's going to come and fix your window very soon."
After a few more minutes a man came to the door with tools in his hand, so the lady let the boy take his ball away.
When the man finished fixing the window, he said to the lady, "That will cost you exactly ten dollars."
"But aren't you the father of that young boy?" the woman asked, looking surprised.
"No," he answered, equally surprised.
"Aren't you his mother?"
***
Johnny was nine years old, and he was a very bad boy, but his mother always hoped that he would behave better. Then one day, after he had come home from school, Johnny's teacher called his mother on the phone and said, "Did you know, Mrs. Perkins, that Johnny saved another boy when he fell into the river while we were out for a walk this morning?"
Mrs. Perkins was very happy when she heard this.
She thought, "Johnny's becoming a good boy." Then she turned to him and said, "That was your teacher.
Why didn't you tell me you had been such a brave boy and saved one of your friends when he fell into the river this morning?"
But Johnny did not look very happy when he heard this.
His face became very red, and he said, "Well, I really had to pull him out, because I pushed him in."
***
The college had a very good football team, and its best player was a student who always had trouble in school.
Then one year the dean of the college said that the player would have to leave because he had cheated on an exam.
The football coach immediately went to the dean to try to persuade him to let the student stay in school.
The dean showed him two answer papers.
"This one is Susan's paper.
She's the best student in the class," he said.
"And this one's your football player's.
They're exactly the same.
The football player sat at the next desk, and just copied from her."
"But maybe she copied from him," the coach said.
You can't prove it was the other way."
"Look at this," the dean said." Susan didn't know the answer to this question, so she wrote, 'I don't know.' And your football player wrote, 'Neither do I.'"
***
Mr. Harris had never married, and he lived in a small house by himself.
He was always very careful about what he ate and drank, and he never went out when the weather was cold.
He was always afraid that he was getting some terrible disease, so he often went to see his doctor, and the doctor was getting very tired of his patient's imagined illnesses, because he had more important work to do.
Then one day Mr. Harris hurried into the doctor's office and told him he was sure he had a certain terrible disease which he had read about in the newspaper.
He showed the doctor the article.
The doctor read it carefully and then said, "But, Mr. Harris, people don't know when they have this disease! There are no symptoms, and they feel very good."
"Oh, my goodness!" said Mr.
Harris.
"I thought so.
That's just how I feel!"
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PS: although there are short anecdotes:
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One man approached to his friend who sat on a railways.
"Move a bit," he said, sitting next to him.
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:)
Bye, Anton!
Alexander Koryagin
english_tutor 2024
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* Origin:
news://news.fidonet.fi (2:221/6.0)
