For all your April Fool's Day greetings!

1. Insult me but don't ignore me

2. Questions
   of etiquette

3. Me exaggerate?

4. Wordplay me this

5. Where'd you say you were from?

6. Metaphorically speaking

7. Smart ass
   waiters

8. Politically wise acre

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1. Insult me but don't ignore me

• He's the only man I ever knew who had rubber pockets so he could steal soup. (Wilson Mizner)

• You ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup? (John Mendoza)

• He found a great way to eat his wife's soup. He pretends it's mud. (Milton Berle)

• I once cut my mouth on my wife's soup. (Milton Berle)

• She loves to make soup--especially cream of yesterday. (Milton Berle)

• I cast my bread upon the waters tonight. Of course my wife claimed it was soup.

• Everything she cooks turns out tough. Can anyone lend me a soup knife?

• A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on an island with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Let's smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let's build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Let's assume that we have a can-opener."

2. Questions of etiquette

• Mummy, mummy, what's a vampire? Shut up and eat your soup before it clots.

• I was eating soup at a restaurant the other night when I dropped my spoon. A waiter walking past at that moment immediately produced one from his pocket and placed it before me. "Do you always carry a soup spoon in your pocket?" I asked. "Well sir," he said, "We had an efficiency expert give a lecture here last week and he told us that 30 percent of all diners who order soup drop their spoons. So rather than make such frequent trips back to the silverware station he advised us to all carry soup spoons to save time." I had to agree it made sense in an odd sort of way. During dessert I noticed the same waiter walk by, and there was a string dangling from his fly. I motioned him over and discreetly pointed it out. "Thank you sir." he said. "This is part of the efficiency program as well. You see, the other end of the string is attached to my, um, privates. When we male waiters need to pee, we just unzip our fly, use the loose end of the string to pull ourselves out, and pee without ever touching anything. Therefore we don't have to wash our hands and it saves about a minute each time." I thought about this for a moment then asked him, "But how do you get yourself back in your pants?" "I don't know what the other waiters do sir, but I use the soup spoon." (Many thanks for the contribution from Tom Notes from Highland Lakes, New Jersey)

• A minister was at a banquet when a careless waiter dropped a steaming bowl of soup into his lap. The minister looked around the room with agony in his face and finally whispered, "Would some layman kindly say something appropriate?" (Milton Berle)

• "Which hand should you use to stir the soup?" "Neither, you should use a spoon."

• The fabulously wealthy banker Baron von Rothschild was traveling through the countryside and stopped for breakfast at a little deli. The soup was absolutely delicious. When he finished, the waiter brought him the bill. Rothschild was stunned: $100 for a bowl of chicken soup, he exclaimed. That's impossible. Is chicken soup so rare in these parts? No, replied the waiter, but Rothschilds are.

• To soup--may it be seen and not heard.

• "Waiter, come here and taste this soup." "Where's the spoon?" "Gotcha!"

• A middle-aged man was sitting in a truck stop when three mean-looking bikers walked in. The first walked over to the man and stubbed a cigarette out in his soup. Then the second biker spat in the soup. Finally the third biker picked up the bowl of soup and threw it on the floor. Without saying a word, the man got up and left. "He wasn't much of a man, was he?" sneered one of the bikers to the waitress. "Not much of a truck driver, either," she said. "He just backed his truck over 3 motorcycles."

• A guy sat down in a restaurant and ordered a bowl of bean soup. "I'm sorry," the waitress said, "but the customer next to you had the last bowl." The guy could see that the other customer had left most of the soup. "Could I have that?" he asked. "Sure." So he started eating--but halfway down he discovered a dead mouse. "Ugh," he said, "I just found a dead mouse in the soup." "That's as far as I got too," said the other man."

• "Good manners: the noise you don't make when you're eating soup." (Bennett Cerf)

• There once was an ambitious young waiter who left the Regents Palace Hotel in London to join the staff of Claridge's. On his second night in the dining room, as he was serving soup to Lord and Lady Thingamy at table 14, he noticed that one of her ladyship's breasts had fallen out of her decolletage and was, as they say, hanging loose. With perfect aplomb, he replaced it in her bodice with a soup spoon and returned to his station, where he was met by a glowering maitre d'. "That may be how they do things at the Regents Palace Hotel, Higgins," he snapped furiously, "but in Claridge's, we would always use a warm spoon."

3. Me exaggerate?

• I put instant soup in a microwave and almost went back in time. (Steven Wright)

• I make soup so thick that when I stir it, the room goes round.

• We were eating in this open-air café when it started raining. It took us an hour and a half to finish our soup.

• She's such a noisy eater that when she started on the soup, six people got up and started doing the polka.

• Some of the stuff that stares out of gumbo should not be allowed out except for Halloween. (Steve Epstein)

• I don't want to panic, but my alphabet soup says, "Forget about me...just try to save yourself." (Tom Wilson)

• He's so meticulous he eats his alphabet soup in alphabetical order. (Mitch Murray, 60's songwriter turned speechwriter)

• When their little boy wouldn't speak, mom and dad took him to the doctor, who was also baffled. Finally one day the boy said, "My soup is too cold." His parents were ecstatic. "Why haven't you spoken to us up to now?" "Because the soup was never too cold before."

4. Wordplay me this

• "A bowl of alphabet soup a day is good for the vowels." (Mitch Murray, 60's songwriter turned speechwriter)

• "Wonton disregard: negligently serving hot noodle soup" (L.A. Times, 4/16/02)

• "What do ducks have for lunch?" "Soup and quackers"

• "Never darken my Dior again" (Canadian actress, when a waiter at Buckingham Palace spilled soup on her dress)

• When is soup musical? When it's piping hot.

• On bad movies: "Better films have formed atop day-old soup."

• "At the Olympics, Mormon president Gordon B. Hinckley met with President Bush and the First Lady and declared them both from 'good stock.' Does he mean, like, soup?" (Ron C. Judd, Seattle Times).

• What do you call 2,000 pounds of Chinese Soup? Won Ton.

• You know how movies always have sex scenes and the studios say that is because sex is part of life and movies should be lifelike? So why don't movies have more soup scenes? Soup is part of life; no one was ever too tired to have soup.... (Jackie Mason, in The World According to Me--many thanks to Louis S. for the contribution).

• I went to a restaurant that serves "lunch at any time." So I ordered bean soup during the Renaissance." (Stephen Wright)

• "What's the difference between roast beef and pea soup?" "Anyone can roast beef."

• A retired printer went into the restaurant business. One day one of his customers cried, "This is an outrage--there's a needle in this soup!" "Merely a typographical error, sir," said the printer, "should have been 'noodle.'"

• When Marilyn Monroe was married to Arthur Miller, she got tired of his mother always serving matzo ball soup. "Gee, Arthur," she said after the tenth time, "These matzo balls are pretty nice, but isn't there any other part of the matzo you can eat?"

• Checking the menu, a restaurant customer ordered a bowl of vegetable soup. After a couple spoonsful, he saw a circle of wetness right under the bowl on the tablecloth. He called the waitress over and said, "It's all wet down here. The bowl must be cracked." The waitress said, "You ordered the vegetable soup, didn't you?" "Yes," he replied. "Well, maybe it has a leek in it." (Milton Berle)

• The cannibal wiped his mouth daintily and said, "My wife makes great soup. But I'll miss her."

• "Yes, I know fish is brain food, but I don't care much for fish. Isn't there some other brain food?" "Well, there's noodle soup."

• "Will you join me in a bowl of soup?" "Is it big enough for both of us?"

• "What do you call a chicken in a hot tub?" "Soup."

• Bill and Hillary Clinton were at a restaurant. The waitress asked Hillary for her order. She said, "I'll have the onion soup and the chicken dinner." The waitress said, "what would you like for your vegetable?" Hillary said, "He can order for himself."

• "What is Dracula's favorite soup?" "Scream of tomato."

• "What does a dragon eat with soup?" "Firecrackers."

• "Is chicken soup good for your health?" "Not if you're the chicken."

• "What does pea soup taste like when it gets cold?" "I don't know. Who would eat cold pea soup?"

• Big Brother to Little Brother: After everything I say, you say "Pea Green Soup," Okay?
  LB: Okay.
  BB: What did you have for breakfast?
  LB: Pea Green Soup.
  BB: What did you have for lunch?
  LB: Pea Green Soup.
  BB: What did you have for supper?
  LB: Pea Green Soup.
  BB: What did you do all night?
  LB: Pea Green Soup!
  (Thanks to Barbara Conko of Odenton, MD, for the contribution)

5. Where'd you say you were from?

• We've got chicken in a basket here, and for Irish folks we've got soup in a basket. (Irish comedian)

• A catskill manhattan: a glass of beet soup garnished with a small boiled potato. (Mrs. Nussbaum/Minerva Potts)

• Mrs. Goldberg refuses to believe that her husband is dead. She sits by his gurney in the mortuary and continues to forcefeed him chicken soup. The doctor comes by and asks her what she thinks she's doing. It may not help, she says, but it couldn't hurt.

• In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations--it's cold, half-French, and difficult to stir. (Stuart Keate)

• There are only two kinds of Soviet soup: Russian shchi, made of cabbages and beets, and Ukrainian borscht, made of beets and cabbages.

• What's the difference between an Italian mother and a Jewish mother? An Italian mother tells her child: "If you don't eat your soup, I'll kill you." A Jewish mother tells her child: "If you don't eat your soup, I'll kill myself."

• An American woman traveling in Southeast Asia was horrified to be served bird's nest soup, especially when the chef explained the bird had built the next using its own saliva as glue. When she refused to eat anything with bird saliva in it, the chef asked what she would prefer instead. "Oh," she answered, just fix me an omelette."

6. Metaphorically speaking

• Russians say, "We know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup; the question is, can you turn the fish soup back into an aquarium?"

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. (H.L. Mencken)

• The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. (Seinfeld)

• Stephen King on his writing style: "The literary equivalent of turkey rice soup."

• Anton Chekhov on his late writing style: "writing for me now is like eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach has been removed"

• "There are two types of people in this world: shlemihls and shlimazls. A shlemihl is the person who always spills soup, and a shlimazl is the person he spills it on. I'm the shlemihl and you're the shlimazl." (Bernstein to Archie Bunker in "All in the Family")

7. Smart ass waiters

• "Waiter, there's a dead fly in my soup!"

  "Well, you asked for something with a little body in it."

  "It must have committed insecticide."

  "Yes, sir, flies aren't very good swimmers"

  "Yes, sir, it's the heat that kills them."

  "Yes, sir, we ran out of spiders"

• "Waiter! I'd like a French style soup. Do you have frog legs?" "Yes, of course, Sir." "Well then, leap over the counter and get me some French soup, will you?"

• "Hey waiter, this soup tastes like dish water!" "How do you know?"

• "Hey waiter, this soup tastes funny!" "Then why aren't you laughing?"

• "Hey waiter, you've got your thumb in my soup!" "Don't worry, it isn't very hot."

• "Waiter! Is there soup on the menu?" "No, sir, I wiped it all off."

• "Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?" "Looks like the backstroke, sir."

• "Waiter, I can't find any chicken in the chicken soup." "Well, you won't find any horse in the horseradish either."

• "Hey waiter, I just found a pearl in my oyster stew." "That's not so surprising, Madam. What's really amazing is a patron found an oyster in his yesterday." (Thanks to Van Burgess for the contribution)

• Waiter, my plate is wet!" "It's not wet, sir--that's the soup."

• A man walked into a restaurant and said, "I'd like a bowl of soup and a kind word. The waiter brought his soup in a moment. As he put it down, the man whispered, "How about the kind word?" The waiter said, "Don't eat the soup."

• "Waiter, this soup is spoiled." "Who told you?" "A little swallow."

• "Waiter, there's dirt in my soup. What does this mean?" "If you want your fortune told, go to a gypsy." (Milton Berle)

• The chef tells the waiter, "Push the soup du jour. It's a week old." (Milton Berle)

• "Waiter, what's that in my soup?" "I'd better call the manager, sire--I can't tell one insect from another."

• "Waiter, what's this?!" "It's bean soup, sir." "I don't care what it's been. What is it now?"

• Waiter! There's a button in my soup." "Thank you, sir. I wondered what had happened to it."

• The cook flew into a rage at his new waiter. "Didn't I tell you to notice when the soup boiled over?" "I did," said the waiter, "It was 3:30 pm."

• "Waiter, there's a fly in my soup!"

  "Shhhhhh. Everyone will want one."

  That's funny. There were two when I left the kitchen"

  "Don't worry, sir, the spider in the bread roll will get it."

  "That's possible. The chef used to be a tailor."

  "Now that fly knows a good soup." (Milton Berle)

  "Okay, I'll bring you a fork."

  "So what? There's soup on your fly."

  "Don't worry, it's not hot enough to burn him."

  "No, sir, that's the essential vitamin bee."

• Brussels variation: "Garçon, le mouche dans ma soupe!" "Non, monsieur, la mouche" "Mon Dieu, you Belgians have wonderful eyesight!"

• And now the ultimate classic Godzilla meets King Kong "fly in the soup" joke, contributed and polished by Jon Erikson of Colorado, who says, "Author: Anonymous (this has become folk art: added to, edited, and expanded to highlight individual experiences of the numerous authors who found it on the net and passed it on. Some day it may come back as an epic novel). Scene: A restaurant, between noon and 1:00 p.m. on a weekday :

  Patron: Waiter!
  Waiter: Hi, my name is Bill, and I'll be your Support. What seems to be the problem?
  Patron: There's a fly in my soup!
  Waiter: Try again; maybe the fly won't be there this time.
  Patron: [looks away, then back] No, it's still there.
  Waiter: Maybe it's the way you're using the soup. Try eating it with a fork instead.
  Patron: [tries fork] Even when I use the fork, the fly is still there.
  Waiter: What are your "table" settings? Have you tried reversing the position of your knife and spoon?
  Patron: [makes the switch] That doesn't do anything.
  Waiter: This might be a server problem. Lots of these things are server problems.
  Patron: YOU'RE MY SERVER! THIS IS NOT A SERVER PROBLEM!!!
  Waiter: Maybe the soup is incompatible with the bowl. What kind of bowl are you using?
  Patron: A SOUP bowl!
  Waiter: Hmmm, that should work. Maybe it's a configuration problem. How was the bowl set up?
  Patron: You brought it to me on a saucer. What has that to do with the fly in my soup?!
  Waiter: Can you remember everything you did before you noticed the fly in your soup?
  Patron: I sat down and ordered the Soup of the Day!
  Waiter: Did you change the flavor settings? Did you alter the salt or pepper content?
  Patron: No. I'm soup illiterate. I only eat it the way it comes.[sneezes]
  Waiter: Have you checked it for viruses?
  Patron: I got it from you.
  Waiter: Yes, but have you downloaded anything else into the soup?
  Patron: Just crackers.
  Waiter: And where did you get the crackers?
  Patron: FROM YOU! THEY CAME WITH THE SOUP!!
  Waiter You did take the cellophane off first before inserting the crackers, didn't you?
  Patron: YES!!
  Waiter: They should be okay then. Hmmm. Have you considered upgrading to the latest Soup of the Day?
  Patron: You have more than one Soup of the Day each day??
  Waiter: Yes, the Soup of the Day is changed every hour.
  Patron: Well, what is the Soup of the Day now?
  Waiter: The current Soup of the Day is Tomato 2001.
  Patron: Fine. Bring me the tomato soup, and hurry. I'm running late now.
  [Waiter leaves and returns with another bowl of soup.]
  Waiter: Here you are, Sir.
  Patron: This is potato soup.
  Waiter: Yes, the tomato release time had to be revised to accommodate changes to the recipe.
  Patron: Well, I'm so hungry now, I'll eat anything.
  [Waiter leaves.]
  Patron: Waiter! There's a fly in my soup! Waiter! Waiter! [sees a bus boy] Hey, you, where's my waiter?
  Bus Boy: I'm sorry; all of our waiters are currently busy. They are helping other customers. The estimated time until your waiter is free is eighteen minutes.
  Patron: I can't wait that long. Listen, could you just bring me a sandwich? I need to go and I can't leave without eating.
  Bus Boy: Sir, I'm a bus boy. I can't take orders or carry food. You could access a sandwich on our self-service help counter.
  Patron: Please, just for me. I'll give you an extra five dollars.
  Bus Boy: What kind of sandwich?
  Patron: Roast beef.
  Bus Boy: I'll get it for you right away.
  [Enter Waiter]
  Waiter: I'm sorry, sir, this meal has performed an illegal operation and will have to be shut down. [Glares at the bus boy, who slinks off. Confiscates the soup. Hands the patron the check.] Your check, sir.
  Patron: What's this? "Soup of the Day $5.00... Upgrade to newer Soup of the Day $2.50... Access to Support $2.00 ... TOTAL: $9.50 + Tax ... Gratuity not included."
  Gratuity?! I tell you, he's not getting more than a buck!
  Waiter: Excuse me sir. You forgot your fly.

8. Politically wise acre

• What do the people at the SEC eat for lunch these days? Enron and Cream of Mushroom soup. [Ellen Black, Washington Post, 6/16/02)

• George W. Bush did something I thought was pretty interesting. He invited Congress to a big luncheon at the White House and only, listen to this, only a third of them showed. That seems kind of rude, doesn't it? But be fair, who really wants to watch Dick Cheney take his soup intravenously? (David Letterman, January 2001)

• In the wake of the January 2002 pretzel attack in the White House: "George W. Bush has a big weekend planned. He's going to stay in the White House and watch television, just like he did last weekend. He'll be just like Cheney; he'll be hooked up to an IV the whole time. But he's going to watch football on television and he said this weekend, instead of pretzels, it'll be soup." (David Letterman)