422: Comedians of Christmas Comedy Special
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Everybody knows the holidays can be stressful and so with the holidays upon us we thought you know it would be nice an hour of jokes let's do an hour of holiday jokes but reflecting on this for about ten seconds made us realize there's actually no such thing think about it for a second what is your favorite Christmas joke right like even kids who love Christmas and love jokes do not have Christmas jokes to be sure this is true we actually ran a scientific test this week where we asked a group of kids to tell us their favorite Christmas joke. Okay. I don't really know why. Can I go first? One of our producers Jonathan Menhevar went to the playground at New York's PS 11 asking third graders for Christmas jokes and while none of them knew any Christmas jokes it turns out that all of them were willing on the spot apparently any third grader will do this they were willing to make up Christmas jokes. Why did the Rainier cross the road? I don't know why. To get to the to get to the horn station. You know the horn station. The horn. What what's a horn station? Where they get new horns. I don't know if you could hear that one of the one of the kids in the background goes that makes sense everyone then agrees. Since I'm not sure I understand. Because Rainiers have horns and then they need new horns. Yeah and then sometimes like rainiers if they get their antlers like broke off they grow back in and this joke they go to a store. Here's another one. There was a chicken that's like running around like crazy and Christmas Eve and like and then Santa came like hey Santa can I go on and the Santa's like you can get out of the deer but not on my head. Right there Santa gets married with a skinny woman. Yeah I feel like the setup is off in the best part of these jokes. Why does Santa get married to a skinny woman? Because Santa feels bad that he's so fat and she's so skinny and she only wants to see somebody that's skinny. I'm glad to say that that some of the jokes the kids made up on the spot did actually have the structure of real jokes and worked as real jokes with punchlines that actually made actual sense. I didn't Santa know where the presents. I don't know. Because it wasn't Christmas. Okay this next one was told to Jonathan by a little kid who first explained that they don't celebrate Christmas they celebrate Hanukkah with the Hanukkah Menorah and all that. When is the Christmas tree say to the menorah? I don't know. He says you don't have decorations like me. I'm more popular than you. It's funny because it's true. Jonathan Judy wasn't sure to say to this little Jewish kid about that joke. Wow. The Christmas trees mean. Christmas you guys mean. But the menorah actually has good intelligence. Good as East jokes are. Fact is if you want a Christmas holiday special that's filled with jokes you really have to go to professionals. And so in preparation for today's show we went to stand up comedians and performers and we put them on stage in little clubs and venues wherever they like to try out new material over the last few weeks. And today from a small club with just I don't think about 200 people in it we bring you our comedians of Christmas special. We have some people who you've heard of on our show before like Mike Berbiglia lots of amazingly funny people who you may not know. We have actually never tried this before and it's been completely exciting seeing what happens when we throw a theme like Christmas to these really talented funny people. And so from W.B.E.Z. Chicago it's this American life distributed by Public Radio International Amira Glass. Stay with us. Equin Christ has prison. We were worried that was a little too Easter. Christmas show.
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