Old Jews Telling Jokes (13 page)

Charlotte Bornstein grew up in Boston and later moved to Los Angeles. She still roots for the Sox and the Celtics and still cannot pronounce words with
r
in them.

This woman in New York jumps into a cab, and she’s stark naked. I mean, butt naked. She says, “Take me to Fifth and Broadway.”

The cabdriver’s looking in his mirror, and he’s thinking, Oh, great. He says, “Lady, how do you plan on paying me? I mean, you have no clothes on, and you don’t even have a purse with you—so how are you going to pay me?”

She says, “I’m gonna pay you with this,” and points to her vagina.

He looks through the rearview mirror and says, “Lady, haven’t you got anything a little smaller?”

After my father retired from the bench he teamed up with a law firm to do mediation and arbitration. That’s how we found Richard Levine. He is a longtime client of the firm.

A woman meets her friend. She says, “How ya doin’? I understand you’ve been on vacation?”

She says, “Oy, what a vacation we had.”

She says, “Where’d you go?”

“I went with Sarah and Sadie. We went to a travel agent, and she sends us to a place in the Caribbean called Club Med. We don’t know from nothing. We go there, nice room, right on the beach, a pretty day. So we take our blanket, and we go sit on the beach. You won’t believe what it was.”

“What are you talking, ‘what it was’? What was it?”

“It was a nude beach! People walking around naked. The men walking around hanging like this.”

“No kidding?”

She says, “Yeah, then you know what happened?”

“What happened?”

“One of the men came over to the blanket. Sarah took one look and had a stroke.”

She says, “Oh my God!”

“Then Sadie had a look and had a stroke!”

“You, Becky, are you all right?”

“Me?” she says. “I wouldn’t touch that thing!”

According to Mr. Bergman, his first full sentence was “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a brothel.”

His intellectual development ended there.

An elderly, slight man walks into a church, walks over to the confessional, sits down. Priest pulls back the little curtain, the man doesn’t say anything. He just sits there. Finally the priest, to move things along, says, “Can I help you, my son?”

The man says, “I vant you should listen to vat I’m going to tell you.”

The priest says, “Okay …”

The man says, “Foist of all, you should know I’m eighty-seven years old.”

“Eighty-seven. Has it been a good life?”

“Is ups and downs, good, bad, like everyting else, until eleven months ago.”

“What happened eleven months ago?”

“My vife, Shirley, may she rest in peace, she pass avay.”

“How long were you married?”

“Ve married sixty-three vonderful years. I vas so lonely, I don’t know vat I would do, vat saved my life—there’s a voman, a girl, maybe thirty-two years old, lives in the building, she comes over, she bring me a bowl of soup, a chicken …”

“What a Christian act!”

“Vell, ve never talked about nothing like that, but I vanted to say thank you, so at last I took her out to dinner to a nice place in the neighborhood, had a vonderful dinner, came back to the building, and she said that she had just made a fresh cake, you should come up and have a piece of cake, I go up to her apartment—to make a long story short, we ended up last night making love seven times.”

The priest says, “Seven times?”

“That’s right, seven times.”

The priest says, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Ask me vatever you want to ask me.”

“Are you Catholic?”

He says, “I’m not Catholic!”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“I’m telling everybody!”

Harry Riskin went to college with my father at Rutgers, where they were fraternity brothers. He has devoted his law practice to the area of real estate value litigation and the defense of property rights for property owners for over forty years. Riskin served as deputy attorney general for the state of New Jersey and was also special counsel to the commissioner of transportation.

Murray is getting on in age, and he marries this much, much younger woman. As a result, they’re having some problems with intimacy—the younger woman is just not being satisfied. So they decide to go see the rabbi for advice.

Murray tells the rabbi that he’s trying to satisfy his young wife, and that he’s been unable to do that. The rabbi strokes his beard thoughtfully and says to Murray, “Let’s try something they did years ago. Go out and find a nice, handsome young man. Have him come in while you’re making love and wave a towel while you’re performing.”

Murray and his wife agree to do what the rabbi suggests. They go out and find a handsome young man and they bring him into the bedroom with them. Murray gets into bed with his young, beautiful wife, and the young man waves a towel while they have sex. They try this a couple of times, and it doesn’t work. The wife is getting no satisfaction. They decide to go back to see the rabbi again.

They tell the rabbi what happened, and the rabbi listens to them, and says, “Listen. Why don’t you go back and try it again, but just reverse roles. Murray, you wave the towel. The handsome young man, he gets into bed with your wife, and let’s see what that does. We do anything in the Jewish tradition to satisfy our wives.”

They go home and go back into the bedroom. The handsome young man comes in, and Murray explains to him what has to be done. Murray picks up the towel, the handsome young man gets into bed with the wife, and they start having wild, passionate sex. The wife starts screaming, going absolutely crazy, having this wild orgasm.

Murray grabs the young man and says, “Schmuck, this is how you wave a towel!”

9
Oral Sex

GROWING UP IN MY GENERATION, BEFORE THE INTERNET, SOME
boys were introduced to oral sex through illicit copies of
Penthouse
or the stories of older friends or relatives. This joke (I can’t recall the teller) was my introduction:

Now that’s something to anticipate!

Oral sex has long been taboo among all cultures. But for the Jews it has held a special concern, not because it is forbidden, but because it directly conflicts with two activities for which the mouth can more efficiently be used: eating and complaining.

In truth, Jewish men do have a commandment to reproduce. Consequently, during his wife’s fertile period, theoretically, he shouldn’t, shall we say, waste the seed. But outside of that commandment, the Halacha is fairly supportive of husbands and wives doing whatever they find mutually enjoyable.

“Honey, what do you mean you don’t like to do it? The Halacha is very supportive of it. My birthday? That isn’t for like eight months!”

I don’t know, maybe the Halacha argument will work for you. If it does, let me know. Giving up bacon might be worth it.

Allen Pinsky went to Camp Delwood with my dad. Then they lived in the same community in central New Jersey for many years, but my father never recognized him because he didn’t have white hair when they were kids at summer camp.

Mr. Rabinowitz is suffering from a malady that nobody can diagnose. They’ve gone up to Mass. General, they’ve gone to Mount Sinai, University of California, University of Chicago, nobody can tell him what’s happening. They finally go to a famous physician at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

The doctor says, “Mr. Rabinowitz. What’s bothering you?”

He runs him through an exhaustive battery of tests and lo and behold, he discovers what’s wrong.

“Mr. Rabinowitz, is your wife waiting for you?”

“Yes, she’s in the waiting room.”

“Will you step outside and ask her to come in here?”

She comes in and says, “Yes, doctor? What’s the matter with my Irving?”

“Mr. Rabinowitz has a very, very rare disease. It’s almost invariably fatal. There’s only one cure for it.”

“Yes, what’s that? We’ll do anything.”

“The only thing that will help him is oral sex.”

“What?”

“Oral sex. Do you know what that means?”

“Oh yeah, oral sex, I know.”