US comedian Bob Hope, whose death was announced Monday, assembled an unprecedented archive of around 7 million jokes during his seven-decade career -- all of them clean.
The funnyman's collection of gags even won a place among the trophies and knicknacks of presidents of the US when the country's Library of Congress opened a permanent exhibit of his wisecracks in 2000.
The display features examples of Hope's jokes alongside photographs of his childhood and his early career in show business of the entertainer who celebrated his centenary less than two months ago.
Many of Hope's biting one-liners have entered popular culture, but despite his popularity and readiness to take potshots at politicians and rival Hollywood stars, the family man always eschewed blue humor.
Hope employed over 100 writers to create jokes and lines for his famous and topical radio and stage monologues, and got inside information from army personnel in order to create in-jokes to amuse the 10 million troops he entertained over the years.
Here are some of the jokes and one-liners that made the comic and actor, who left Britain at the age of four for America, one of the best-known entertainers of the 20th century.
On his British roots, he said:
-- "I left England at an early age, as soon as I was old enough to realize they already had a king."
-- My folks were English ... we were too poor to be British."
On his passion for golf:
-- "Golf is my profession. Show business is just to pay the green fees," he said of his lifelong love of the game which he helped popularize.
-- "I set out to play golf with the intention of shooting my age, but I shot my weight instead!"
On his old age and busy life, Hope quipped:
-- "I don't feel old -- I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap."
-- "If I had my life to live over ... I wouldn't have time."
-- "You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake."
-- "I'm so old that they've canceled my blood type," he said just before his 100th birthday in May
-- "I was able to find my original birth certificate, but it took three guys to help me get it. Stone tablets are heavy."
On the Oscars:
-- "Oscar night at my house is called Passover," he said of the awards which he never won for his movie work.
On his childhood and large family:
-- "I came from a very big family. Four of us slept in the same bed. When we got cold, Mother threw on another brother. With so many boys, my father bought us a dachshund so we could all pet him at the same time."
On performing before a live audience:
-- "I really played some rough houses. I remember one theater: The audience was so rough, they used to tie the tomatoes on the end of yo-yos so they could hit you twice."
On Sex:
-- "My father told me all about the birds and the bees, the liar -- I went steady with a woodpecker till I was 21."
On his partnership with pal Bing Crosby, co-star of the "Road to ..." movies:
-- "It was love at first sight. We started to insult each other from the moment we met."
-- "Bing was always kissing Dorothy Lamour, and I was always kissing a gorilla or a camel. We both made a lot of money. But most of mine went to cure hoof-and-mouth disease."
-- "You know, all during the years, people have tried to describe Bing's voice, but I think my grandmother came closest of all. She says it sounds like a passionate cow being milked with suede gloves."
On politicians, the lifelong Republican supporter said:
-- "It appears that the president taped all his conversations in the Oval Office," he said of disgraced Republican Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal that toppled him. "I just hope that 18 minutes of missing tape included some of the bad jokes I told him."
-- "It's not hard to find Jerry Ford on a golf course -- you just follow the wounded," he said of the former president noted for his clumsiness.
-- "The Republicans wanted to balance the budget but after seeing what the Democrats left they found they had to budget the balance."
-- "I played golf with him yesterday," he said of former US president and army general Dwight Eisenhower. "It's hard to beat a guy who rattles his medals while you're putting. Ike uses a short Democrat for a tee."
On war and military topics:
-- "I was on the way to my hotel and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction," he told an audience after he narrowly escaped a bomb blast at his hotel in Saigon in, then, South Vietnam.
-- "The stealth bomber is supposed to be a big deal. It flies in undetected, bombs, then flies away. Hell, I've been doing that all my life."
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist