Very old joke. Here’s the role-independent version:
“Blame your predecessor”
“Blame the reorg”
“Make three envelopes”
“Blame your predecessor”
“Blame the reorg”
“Make three envelopes”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/01/15/a...
A bunch of them were great. One I recall,
American: The U.S. is the best! I can stand in front of the Whitehouse and yell, Ronald Regan is the worst president ever!
Soviet: Comrade, I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell the same thing!
There's a bunch, with varying levels of grim. If you're ever bored, it's a rabbit hole that's worth poking around in.
A man yells in the street: "Nicholas is a moron!". He is taken away by the police on charges of lese majeste (insulting the monarch). He tells the policemen "Please let me go, I meant another Nicholas!". The police chief replies: "Do not lie. If you said 'moron', you certainly meant the Tsar!"
Soviet standing in red square handing out blank pieces of paper.
Police come, and tell him to stop distributing protest flyers.
Protestors: Protest? they're blank paper!
Police: Comrade, everyone knows what's wrong.
I might have messed it up a little, but, you get the gist.
Russia arrested anti-war protesters holding blank signs: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-protest...
But apparently this a thing in many countries, and there's even a Wikipedia article about this form of protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_piece_of_paper
Ah, to be in America:
>In 1970, Anna Halprin organised a "Blank Placard Dance" by members of her San Francisco Dancers' Workshop. They paraded, dressed in white, while holding blank placards. She explained, "...there were so many protests going on and this way each person watching us could just imagine whatever protest slogan they wanted on the placards."
It's nice to be able to protest with blank signs because you want to make a joke, and not because of fear of arrest.
Since this is a joke thread, I'll share one related to this concept:
The police catch a man trying to sneak a bomb onto a plane, and question him.
Man: I was doing it to increase the flight's safety!
Police: How can a bomb make a flight safer?
Man: Obviously I'm not going to set mine off, and what are the chances that there are two bombs on the same flight??
My dad would bring home photocopied jokes or cartoons from work. It's funny to imagine someone making 50 copies of one of these, then passing them out around their workplaces laughing with their co-workers.
15 years later you saw the same stuff in email, fwd: FWD: FWD: Re: Why American is great
Comrade 2: Premise ridiculous! Who have two potato?
Has anyone formally evaluated joke effectiveness (apart from Monty Python's "deadly joke")?
- Comrade Mikoyan, you forgot your umbrella!
- Don't worry, I'll walk between the raindrops.
The book is usually about how to reach the NYT bestseller list.
- the CEO or other corporate leader - a government leader (sometimes specifically Soviet or British) - a pastor or abbot - military officers of various ranks - a distinctly non-leadership corporate role that can catch a lot of flak (sysadmin)
I wonder how old it is? How far back would envelopes have made sense? Do you suppose Ea-Nasr left three bullae to his successor?
/2/ Lay off thousands of workers. Squeeze out a blandly sorrowful text and a few cold tears.
/3/ Take the money and run, don't trouble yourself about leaving any envelopes. But if you have a pang of regret and must leave something, leave your little plastic bottle of cold artifical tears.