Turning to me with some urgency, my sleeping husband stated, “I have to do the cat’s taxes!”

My husband was tossing and turning in bed, so I asked whether he was all right. He replied, “Yes, I talked with the horse, and he didn’t have any suggestions or answers for the project.”

As a kid, I was at a sleepover, and I watched my friend stuff the bedsheet into her mouth, pull it out, and say, “That was good, Mom; what’s for dessert?”

I dreamed I was rocking a baby to sleep. In the morning, my husband, who is bald, told me I patted his head for 30 minutes while repeating, “Go to sleep, baby.”

When my 85-year-old father was in the hospital, his doctor, trying to determine Dad’s mental state, asked, “What gets you up in the morning?”

My father shrugged. “Probably the same thing as everyone. I have to go to the bathroom.”

Ad spotted in my weekly bargain bulletin: “FOR SALE: Crestview cemetery plot, $200, so I don’t have to spend all eternity beside my ex!”

Our son was upset that his baseball coach yelled whenever he or a teammate made a mistake.

“It’s just something coaches do,” I said.

“It’s not personal.”

His response was hard to argue with: “If it’s not personal, then why do they use your name?”

The homework assignment for my Spanish class was to write a paragraph. When I returned their papers, I asked one student if he had used Google Translate or any other online translator to write his paper. He categorically denied doing so. That led to my next question: “Then why is this in French?”

Upon finding a clearly plagiarized paper, I called the student into my office. Pointing to my computer screen, I said, “I found your entire paper online. Do you have anything you want to say about that?”

Her angry response: “Well, I paid my sister to write it, but I didn’t think she’d plagiarize!”

I was describing my job as an engineer to some middle schoolers when I mentioned that “one of my colleagues and I designed a medical instrument for measuring human muscle tone.”

Later, I added, “another colleague and I designed a system to allow merchants to print coupons at the cash register.” Thinking that all this technical talk was confusing, I asked if there were any questions.

There was one: “What’s a colleague?”

A woman at our checkout counter didn’t have enough money to cover her purchase of toilet paper, so I paid the 96 cents.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’m going to think of you every time I use this paper.”

I’m known as a stickler for good spelling. So when an associate e-mailed technical documents and asked me to “decifer” them, I had to set him straight.
“Decipher is spelled with a ph, not an f,” I wrote. “In case you’ve forgotten, spellchecker comes free with your Microsoft program.”

A minute later came his reply: “Must be dephective.”

Visiting Annapolis, I noticed several plebes on their hands and knees holding pencils and clipboards. “What are they doing?” I asked our tour guide.

“Each year, the upper­classmen ask the freshmen how many bricks it took to finish paving this courtyard,” he said.

“So what’s the answer?” my friend asked.

The guide replied, “One.”

I was stationed in England with the Air Force when I went to a local barber. I told him that I had a date that night and asked for a very close shave. After working his magic, the barber exclaimed, “There you go, Yank. If you want it any closer than that, you’ll have to bite ’em off from the inside.”

How did I know my new coworker was a veteran? When I heard him describe the impending birth of his first child as “when the baby has boots on the ground.”

I discovered a shortcut today. If you put your Fitbit in the dryer, you can get a head start on your steps. I had 3,800 steps in before I put on my pants!

At the Christmas Eve service at my church, the pastor, quizzing some children about the nativity, asked, “What gifts did the three wise men give the Christ child?”
“Gold!” one child yelled.“Frankincense!” shouted another. After a pause, a third asked, “Gift cards?”

I grew up above my father’s tavern. When we were kids, we would race each other down the stairs every morning to sweep up the bar and find the change customers had dropped during the night. Years later, as an adult, I found out that my father would throw a few coins over the bar for us to find in the morning. It cost him only a dollar a day to have us fight to be the first one to clean the bar.

A man came through my lane at the grocery store with a jug of wine and a bouquet of roses. But before paying, he set the two items aside and said, “I’ll be right back.” He ran off, only to ­return a minute later with a second jug of wine and another bouquet of roses.

“Two girlfriends?” I asked.“No,” he said. “Just one really angry one.”

In San Diego to work with military linguists, my colleague and I checked into a hotel and ordered a 5 a.m. wake-up call. The next morning, the phone didn’t ring until 5:30.
“You were supposed to call us at 5 a.m.!” I admonished the desk clerk on the other end of the line. “What if I had to close a ­million-dollar contract this morning? Your oversight would have cost me the deal!”

“Sir,” he said calmly, “if you had to close that type of deal, I doubt you’d be staying in this type of hotel.”

A friend paid my mother a visit. Later, I spoke with Mom.
“I was very nervous,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he’s a captain in the Air Force.”

“Mother, as you know, I, too, am a captain in the Air Force.”

“Yes,” she said. “And you also make me nervous when you visit.”

An elderly farmer had an old bull that lost its usual desire and no longer went near the cows. The farmer called the vet, who prescribed a pill to stimulate the bull’s interest.

A few weeks later, the farmer ran into a friend, who asked, “How’s that bull?”

“Great!” said the farmer. “The bull is back to his former frisky self.”

“That’s fantastic. What miracle drug did the vet prescribe?”

“I don’t know,” said the farmer. “But it tastes like licorice.”

My wife keeps telling everyone that she can read their minds, but she never can. She’s telepathetic.

Q: What do you call a lazy baby kangaroo?

A: A pouch potato.

After my 91-year-old mother finished having her hair cut and shaped, the stylist announced, “There, now you look ten years younger.”
My mother, un­impressed, replied, “Who wants to look 81 years old?”

I held a garage sale with my little blond cairn terrier for company. Soon came the first customer. He took his time browsing and examining everything I had out for sale. Eventually, he found something that interested him. “Excuse me,” he said. “How much for the dog?”

My 11-year-old takes his homework seriously. One question required him to write a sentence using the word version. His sentence: “Have you heard of the version Mary?”

One day, my physician father treated himself to a plate of raw oysters and offered to share them with me. Just as I was about to dig in, he picked up an oyster, examined it, and commented, “They remind me of infected tonsils.”And that’s the story of how he ended up eating the entire plate of oysters himself.

My friend took her teenage daughter to a new doctor for a checkup. The nurse asked the usual questions, including if she had an STD.
“No,” said the teen. “We have a Toyota.”

When people hear that my husband and I just celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary, they inevitably ask us the secret to our long, successful marriage. In response, my husband will smile sweetly, nod my way, and explain, “We both love me.”

As the general inspected our troops, he asked some of the Marines which outfit they were serving with. Ramrod straight, each would respond, “Marine Air Group 36, sir” or “Second Marine Division, General.” Then there was one young private. When the general asked, “Which outfit are you in?” the Marine replied, “Dress blues, sir, with medals!”

It was World War II—the front—and we were on high alert. Around midnight, I noticed movement behind a bush. Rather than fire a shot, I shouted out the first half of the password: “George!”
I waited for whoever it was to prove he was an American and reply with the countersign, “Marshall.” Instead, silence.“George!!” Again, no reply. I lifted up my rifle and gave it one last try: “George!!!”An angry voice finally replied, “My name ain’t George!”

A frightened man goes to the secret police and says, “My talking parrot disappeared.”

“Why did you come here? Go to the regular police.”

“I will. I’m just here to tell you that I disagree with whatever that parrot is going to say.”

Q: Who is the leader of the Kitty Communist Party?

A: Chairman Meow.

Q: What is the difference between capitalism and socialism?

A: In a capitalist society, man exploits man,  and in a socialist one, it’s the other way around.

Q: How did we know communism was doomed from the beginning?

A: All the red flags.

Q: Why do Communists drink herbal tea?

A: Because proper tea is theft.

What’s the difference between a  poorly dressed man on a unicycle and a well-dressed man on a bicycle?
Attire.

On a Facebook page for beginning artists, one asked, “Any suggestions for painting dogs?” Another responded,  “Wait till they’re asleep.”

Living in rural Minnesota, I find driving through crowded Minneapolis difficult. “I have trouble figuring out when to turn and what lane to be in,” I complained to my grandson.
His wife could commiserate. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I never know at which cornfield to turn when we come to visit you.”

Our doctor’s office called to let my husband know that the results from his blood tests came back and he was just fine. That didn’t suit my husband.

“What’s my cholesterol level?” he asked.

“Mr. Crocker, you are just fine,” insisted the nurse.

“Still, I’d like you to mail me the results.”

A few days later, he received a postcard from the doctor’s office. It read, “Mr. Crocker, you are just fine!”

My great-aunt looked confused when I told her that my daughter was 18 months old. “Oh,” she said. “I thought she was a year and a half.”

“But Aunt Marie,” I said, “18 months and a year and a half are the same.”

She shrugged. “What do I know? I never had kids.”

An Uber is cruising down a boulevard when it runs a red light. “Hey!” the passenger shouts. “Be careful!”

“Don’t worry,” says the driver. “My brother does it all the time.”

He barrels through the next red light, and the passenger screams, “Stop doing that!”

“I’m telling you, my brother does this all the time.”

They approach the next light. Just when it turns green, the driver slams on the brakes. The confused passenger asks, “You just ran two red lights; why’d you stop at a green?”

“I had to,” says the driver. “My brother might have been coming.”

My father was serving in a port city in post–World War II Germany when a ship laden with GIs docked. As the soldiers disembarked, they started to jeer and boo. The reason? The local band hired to greet them was playing a popular hit of the time, “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.”

My daughter was anxious to do some landscaping at her new home, but then she called up sounding discouraged.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get these flowers planted,” she moaned. “It says to plant in full sun, but it’s been cloudy for four days.”

Although I’d been dating a woman for several months, I guess I didn’t know her as well as I thought. One day I called, and her ten-year-old son answered.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s Tom. Can I speak with your mom?”

He responded, “Are you Tom One or Tom Two?”

Needless to say, his mother is now down to one Tom.

I’m lucky that my wife and mother are very close. I realized just how close the time I drove my mother to her doctor, which my wife usually does. When the doctor came into the room, my own dear mother introduced me as her “daughter-in-law’s husband.”

My six-year-old loved his pet fish. He watched and fed it faithfully, morning and night. But one day while he was in school, his fish died, so I flushed it down the toilet. I told him when he got home, and he was inconsolable. Nothing I said helped. After a while, I asked, “Why are you crying so much?”Arching his back, he shouted, “I wanted to flush!”

Q: How did the dead brother and his dead brother resemble each other?
A: They were dead ringers.

Q: What kind of a shot was the dead man?
A: He had dead aim.

Q: What kind of personality did the dead man have?
A: He gave you the cold shoulder.

Q: How did the two dead brothers do in school?
A: They were dead even.

Q: Why were the people trying to get the dead man to change his mind?
A: Because they knew he was dead wrong.

Q: Why was the dead man not living well?
A: Because he was dead broke.

Q: Why was the dead man not courageous?
A: Because he had cold feet.

Q: Why was the dead man insensitive?
A: Because he had a cold heart.

Q: Why did the dead man divorce his dead wife?
A: Because she was frigid.

Q: Why did the town chase out the dead drifter?
A: Because he was a deadbeat.

Q: If you’re an American in the kitchen, what are you when you’re in the bathroom?

A: European!

I ate a clock yesterday, it was very time-consuming.

Q: How come nobody liked the dead lawyer?
A: Because he was rotten to the core.

Q: What is a dead man’s favorite magazine?
A: Life

Q: Why was the dead man happy to be sentenced during his trial?
A: Because they gave him life.

In the foyer of a church, a young boy was looking at a plaque with the names of men and women who had died in various wars.  He asked the pastor, “Who are these people?”  The pastor said, “Those are members from our church who died in the service.”  The boy asked, “The early service or the second service?”

Q: What do you call an animal you keep in your car?

A: A Carpet

Q: Why shouldn’t you visit an expensive wig shop?

A: It’s too high a price ‘toupee.’

Q: Why did the pig have ink all over its face?

A: Because it came out of the pen.

Whoever said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results has obviously never had to reboot a computer.

—William Petersen

I was on a business call when I realized I was late for a class at the gym. I must have sounded rushed, because the woman on the phone said, “Am I keeping you from something?”

I replied, “I have to leave for tai chi.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding intrigued. “What country is that in?”

—Linda Platt

My paramedic team was called to an emergency. Before we took the patient to the hospital, I had a question for his wife. “Does your husband have any cardiac problems?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said with a note of concern. “His cardiologist just died.”

—Aaron Webster