My bro Joe

Have you ever heard the joke about the guy who walked into a bar and said "ouch" and wondered who over the age of 5 would find that funny?

Today, I present to you, my brother Joe.

This morning I received the following "joke" from my brother Joe:

Last week Indian Chief Iron Feather set the world's record for drinking tea. He consumed 563 cups of tea in two hours twenty-six minutes and 17 seconds. Unfortunately he was found dead the following morning in his teepee.

This is what I'm talking about people. This is what I'm dealing with.

Anyone who attended MTHS probably at some point had a class with Mr. Breese. I was lucky enough to have Breese all four years for one class or another. This meant I got to see Freaks, Marty, Dead Poet's Society, and an assortment of Hitchock films four years in a row. This meant I got to watch Breese recite from memory the back of a toothpaste tube four years in a row. This was four years of hearing "Let's get back on track" while he blew a train whistle and shook a box of staples. And this was four years of classic Breese stories. Whatever story he told that correlated to that picture of the bastketball player standing next to the jockey. And the story of Sam the ghost and the Christmas tree picture. And the story of Annabell Lee, the boat that sank.

Every year, Breese told the story of one student who wrote an entire essay - for a final exam no less - on the famous Poe poem, Annabel Lee. Anyone who has ever read Annabel Lee. Anyone even remotely familiar with the poem. Anyone who has even glanced at more than the first line of the poem knows it's a love poem. Anyone slightly more familiar with the poem, someone in an English class currently studying the poem perhaps, would know that it's about Poe's love for a young woman who dies. Now this particular student decided to take a different approach to the poem and wrote an entire essay on how Annabel Lee was a boat....that sank. Breese gave the student a C for creativity and continued to tell the tale to every class he ever taught for years to come. From what I hear, Breese still tells this story.

The student in the story? Yup, you guessed it. My brother Joe. It's bad enough to have every teacher you ever had in high school read your name off the attendance list the first day of class and have an 'oh God, not another one' reaction - one teacher actually said out loud and I quote 'oh God, not another one' - but to have this story told every year, and to have it be known to everyone in your class that this nimrod student who thought Annabel Lee was a boat that sank was related to you - pure horror I tell you!

Even as I type this I receive another email from my brother Joe. It's long and pointless and pretty much the opposite of funny so I won't even bother sharing it.

I think Joe's friend Frank said it best in his reply:

The jokes considered funny to Joe are not necessarily found funny by everyone on his mailing contacts .....this is a public service announcement thank you