Bob Hope is one of the world’s most recognizable and beloved comedians. From his numerous radio and television shows to his shows with U.S. Troops around the world and much, much, more, Hope put a smile on the faces of all those in his presence. Read on to enjoy some laughs, courtesy of Bob Hope.
On Turning 70 “You still chase women, but only downhill”.
On Turning 80 “That’s the time of your life when even your birthday suit needs pressing…”
On Turning 90 “You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.”
On Turning 100 “I don’t feel old. In fact I don’t feel anything until noon then it’s time for my nap.”
On giving up his early career, boxing “I ruined my hands in the ring … the referee kept stepping on them.”
On never winning an Oscar “Welcome to the Academy Awards or, as it’s called at my home, ‘Passover’.”
On golf “Golf is my profession. Show business is just to pay the green fees.”
On Presidents “I have performed for 12 presidents and entertained only six.”
“I’ve always enjoyed playing golf with a President. The only problem is that there are so many Secret Service men around there’s not much chance to cheat.”
“Clinton had the best score, Ford the most errors, and Bush the most hits. Me, I cheated better than ever.”
On Gerald Ford: “I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from my Jerry Ford jokes. So it’s fun to introduce him at dinners with lines like “You all know Jerry Ford – one of my most prized possessions is the Purple Heart I received for all the golf I’ve played with him.”
On Eisenhower: “By the time that Ike was elected President in 1952, his devotion to golf had become legendary. No administration ever had more sun-tanned Secret Service men.”
On why he chose showbiz for his career “When I was born, the doctor said to my mother, ‘Congratulations, you have an eight-pound ham’.”
On receiving the Congressional Gold Medal “I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.”
On his family’s early poverty “Four of us slept in the one bed. When it got cold, mother threw on another brother.”
On his six brothers “That’s how I learned to dance. Waiting for the bathroom.”
On his early failures “I would not have had anything to eat if it wasn’t for the stuff the audience threw at me.”
On going to heaven “I’ve done benefits for ALL religions. I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.”
My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
I’ll tell ya, my wife and I, we don’t think alike. She donates money to the homeless, and I donate money to the topless!
One night I came home. I figured, let my wife come on. I’ll play it cool. Let her make the first move. She went to Florida.
I asked my old man if I could go ice-skating on the lake. He told me, “Wait til it gets warmer.”
My doctor told me to watch my drinking. Now I drink in front of a mirror. I drink too much. Way too much. My doctor drew blood. He ran a tab.
When I was born the doctor came out to the waiting room and said to my father, “I’m very sorry. We did everything we could…but he pulled through.”
I come from a stupid family. During the Civil War my great uncle fought for the west!
My father was stupid. He worked in a bank and they caught him stealing pens.
My mother had morning sickness after I was born.
My mother never breast fed me. She told me that she only liked me as a friend.
My father carries around the picture of the kid who came with his wallet.
When I played in the sandbox the cat kept covering me up.
I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
One year they wanted to make me poster boy… for birth control.
I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent back a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.
My uncle’s dying wish was to have me sitting on his lap. He was in the electric chair.
One time I went to a hotel. I asked the bellhop to handle my bag. He felt up my wife!
This morning when I put on my underwear I could hear the Fruit of the Loom guys laughing at me.
I’m a bad lover. Once I caught a peeping tom booing me.
My wife only has sex with me for a purpose. Last night she used me to time an egg.
It’s tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won’t drink from my glass!
My wife isn’t very bright. The other day she was at the store, and just as she was heading for our car, someone stole it! I said, “Did you see the guy that did it?” She said, “No, but I got the license plate.”
Last night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. The only trouble was, she was coming home.
A girl phoned me and said, “Come on over. There’s nobody home.” I went over. Nobody was home!
A hooker once told me she had a headache.
I went to a massage parlor. It was self service.
If it weren’t for pick-pocketers, I’d have no sex life at all. Once when I was lost I saw a policeman and asked him to help me find my parents. I said to him, “Do you think we’ll ever find them?” He said, “I don’t know kid. There are so many places they can hide.”
I remember I was so depressed I was going to jump out a window on the tenth floor. They sent a priest up to talk to me. He said, “On your mark…”
When my old man wanted sex, my mother would show him a picture of me.
I had a lot of pimples too. One day I fell asleep in a library. I woke up and a blind man was reading my face.
My wife made me join a bridge club. I jump off next Tuesday.
Last week my tie caught on fire. Some guy tried to put it out with an ax!
I met the surgeon general. He offered me a cigarette.
I was making love to this girl and she started crying. I said, “Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?” She said, “No, I hate myself now.”
I knew a girl so ugly that she was known as a two-bagger. That’s when you put a bag over your head in case the bag over her head breaks.
I knew a girl so ugly, they use her in prisons to cure sex offenders.
I knew a girl so ugly, I took her to the top of the Empire State building and planes started to attack her.
I knew a girl so ugly, the last time I saw a mouth like hers it had a hook on the end of it.
I knew a girl so ugly, she had a face like a saint–a Saint Bernard!
I was tired one night and I went to the bar to have a few drinks. The bartender asked me, “What’ll you have?” I said, “Surprise me.” He showed me a naked picture of my wife.
During sex my wife always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel.
My marriage is on the rocks again. Yeah, my wife just broke up with her boyfriend.
One day as I came home early from work, I saw a guy jogging naked. I said to the guy, “Hey buddy…why are you doing that for?” He said, “Because you came home early.”
I went to see my doctor… Doctor Vidi-boom-ba. Yeah…I told him once, “Doctor, every morning when I get up and look in the mirror I feel like throwing up. What’s wrong with me? He said, “I don’t know, but your eyesight is perfect.”
I told my dentist my teeth are going yellow. He told me to wear a brown necktie.
My psychiatrist told me I’m going crazy. I told him, “If you don’t mind, I’d like a second opinion.” He said, “All right. You’re ugly too!”
I was so ugly, my mother used to feed me with a slingshot!
When I was born the doctor took one look at my face, turned me over and said, “Look, twins!”
And we were poor too. Why, if I wasn’t born a boy, I’d have nothing to play with! With my wife I don’t get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to ‘the best woman a man ever had.’ The waiter joined me.
I’m not a sexy guy. I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped her price.
I tell you, I’m not a sexy guy. I was the centerfold for Playgirl magazine. The staples covered everything!
What a childhood I had, why, when I took my first step, my old man tripped me!
Last week I told my psychiatrist, “I keep thinking about suicide.” He told me from now on I have to pay in advance.
I tell ya when I was a kid, all I knew was rejection. My yo-yo, it never came back!
Oh, when I was a kid in show business I was poor. I used to go to orgies to eat the grapes.
When I was a kid I got no respect. The time I was kidnapped, and the kidnappers sent my parents a note they said, “We want five thousand dollars or you’ll see your kid again.”
I tell ya, my wife was never nice. On our first date, I asked her if I could give her a goodnight kiss on the cheek – she bent over!
I tell you, with my doctor, I don’t get no respect. I told him, “I’ve swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.” He told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.
Some dog I got too. We call him Egypt because he leaves a pyramid in every room.
With my dog I don’t get no respect. He keeps barking at the front door. He don’t want to go out. He wants me to leave.
What a dog I got. His favorite bone is in my arm!
Last week I saw my psychiatrist. I told him, “Doc, I keep thinking I’m a dog.” He told me to get off his couch.
I worked in a pet store and people kept asking how big I’d get.
You can misquote me on this: “Too much fact checking has ruined many a good news story.” ~ Gags (Evaluation)
The misstep was probably inevitable, given the many comparisons made between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. With seven weeks to go in Obama’s presidential campaign, the young candidate from Illinois inadvertently committed one of the most common sins in American politics—he used a phony Lincoln quote.
“Abraham Lincoln once said to one of his opponents,” then-senator Obama asserted, “‘If you stop telling lies about me, I’ll start telling truth about you.'”
William Randolph Hearst, who ran for governor of New York in 1906, also liked that line. But it was Republican senator Chauncey Depew, another prominent New Yorker, who is actually the first person known to employ a version of the phrase to bash his opponents back in the 19th century.
June is the month to celebrate the graduating class. It is also a month when bogus quotations flourish like spring flowers. For that we can thank commencement speakers, lazy speechwriters, partisan politics, and the Internet—that most powerful engine of misinformation. But special thanks should be reserved for American heads of state. Once a president misstates a quote, it’s especially hard to kill it.
John F. Kennedy was a repeat offender. In a 1963 speech, he misquoted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, warning Chinese leaders that in the event of a nuclear war, “the survivors would envy the dead.” Kennedy twice gave Dante credit for the idea that “the hottest places in hell” are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis. But he made perhaps his most resounding misquote in a 1961 speech, when he credited British statesman Edmund Burke with saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Politicians—including presidents Ford and Reagan and, just this past year, Florida governor Charlie Crist—have repeated it ever since.
In fact, the “good men do nothing” line was voted the most popular quote of modern times by the editors of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. One Canadian minister even says the line inspired him to launch a charity devoted to stopping the slaughter and mutilation of Tanzanian albinos. But hold on—there’s no evidence that Burke ever uttered these words. The Oxford editors have since fixed this error, sort of. They list the quote under Burke’s name, along with the notation “attributed (in a number of forms) to Burke, but not found in his writings.”
As for Kennedy’s “Khrushchev” quote? It’s from writer Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. And while Dante wrote about hell, he did not say anything about reserved seating for moral neutralists.
Why don’t we check before repeating others’ words? Why is it that when we do, we can no longer be sure that even the reference books are correct? What motivates speakers—presidents, college professors, actors, and everyday Americans—to blithely misquote, miscredit, and fabricate?
Reader’s Digest has a particular interest in these questions, which we may as well get out of the way now. In The Yale Book of Quotations, published in 2006, editor Fred Shapiro sleuthed commonly misused quotes to their original sources. On numerous occasions, his search ended with a misattributed quote in our magazine. In recent decades, we’ve employed a diligent fact-checking team. But as penance for past sins, we offer the following handy guide.
Just as an exercise, go to your computer’s search engine and type in four words: lie, truth, boots, and world. You will get thousands of references to variations of the following quote: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Most will cite Mark Twain as the author of this aphorism. Al Gore has given Twain credit for it. So has Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.
But Twain didn’t say it. Charles Haddon Spurgeon did, in 1855, and he attributed the wisdom to “an old proverb.” Spurgeon was a mid-19th-century British pastor, as famous in his time as Rick Warren and Billy Graham are today in the United States. But that’s the thing about fame: It can be fleeting.
“The voters have spoken—the bastards” is a frequent laugh line at political dinners, usually attributed to Morris Udall. The witty Arizona congressman may well have said it after losing the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries, but Dick Tuck said it first, in 1966 (though his exact words were “The people have spoken—the bastards”). Who is Dick Tuck? Precisely. For the record, he’s a now-retired political prankster.
“This suggests [a] key reason for getting quotations wrong,” notes wordsmith Ralph Keyes, “the need to put them in familiar mouths.” In his book on frequently misused sayings, The Quote Verifier, Keyes calls this phenomenon flypapering—because quotes stick to people like Twain and Churchill like flypaper. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” for instance, is often given to Twain, but Twain himself gave credit to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was so famous in his day—even in America—that quotes attributed to “a wise statesman” were assumed to be Disraeli’s. But times change.
Regardless of the slogan on T-shirts and beer council ad campaigns, Benjamin Franklin never said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
What he did extol was wine, while making a larger point about the miracles of springtime. “We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle,” Franklin wrote (in French!) in a 1779 letter to his friend the Abbé André Morellet. “But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine—a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
Try putting that on a T-shirt.
Keyes calls this process bumper-stickering. It’s the process that renders Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” into “blood, sweat, and tears.” And turns baseball manager Leo Durocher’s “The nice guys are all over there—in seventh place” as the pithier “Nice guys finish last.” A full word is saved by saying “Beam me up, Scotty,” although the actual Star Trek line is “Beam us up, Mr. Scott.”
President Reagan certainly fit Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage—”grace under pressure” (yes, Hemingway really did say this)—when he told first lady Nancy Reagan, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” after he was shot. This may have been spontaneous, but it wasn’t original. Jack Dempsey said it to his wife after losing the heavyweight boxing title to Gene Tunney in 1926. The president perhaps assumed that everyone would know the reference. Nonetheless, it is often attributed to Reagan.
The past couple of years, as the federal budget has ballooned out of control, Washington wags have been reprising a line usually attributed to former Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, who served on Capitol Hill from 1933 to 1969: “A billion here, a billion there—pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Actually, it’s an old Depression-era line; a variation of the quip was once even attached to Herbert Hoover. But Dirksen was more popular than Hoover. Who wants to hear from the politician most closely associated with the Great Depression? So the line caught on with Dirksen’s name attached.
Many of the sayings often attributed to Ben Franklin were ones he actually appropriated and put into the mouth of Richard in his Colonial-era guide to life, Poor Richard’s Almanack. Franklin didn’t pretend his sayings were original: “Why then should I give my Readers bad lines of my own,” he asked in his 1747 Almanack, “when good ones of other People’s are so plenty?” Thus, “A word to the wise is sufficient” and “Early to bed, early to rise …” are Franklin’s—but not originally.
As a flypaper figure, Franklin is also given credit for words uttered by his contemporaries, such as: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” If this was said at all, it was most likely by Richard Penn, the governor of Pennsylvania during the American Revolution.
There is an old newsroom saying, “too good to check”—meaning, if it’s too good to check, it probably isn’t true. Conservatives may wish that Dwight D. Eisenhower, when asked if he thought he’d made mistakes as president, had replied, “Yes, two, and they are both sitting on the Supreme Court.” It captured his frustration with the liberal tendencies of Earl Warren and William Brennan. But the oft-repeated story is unsourced. True, Eisenhower once told a Republican leader privately that appointing Warren was “one of the two biggest mistakes I made in my administration,” according to an oral history at the Eisenhower library. But the quip itself has been attributed to other presidents and is probably apocryphal.
This kind of thing has gotten worse in the era of the Internet. Surely, liberal activist and singer Barbra Strei sand thought she was being profound at a 2002 fund-raising concert for the Democratic Party when she read what she thought was a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor … When the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry … How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.” Streisand was trying to allude to George W. Bush, but this was no more Shakespeare than it was Dr. Seuss. It was an Internet hoax, which Streisand was forced to acknowledge.
Another Web story involves Miriam Amanda “Ma” Ferguson, Texas’s first woman governor. Someone suggested that the new Spanish-speaking immigrants might benefit from classes taught in their native language. Furious, Ma picked up the King James Version of the New Testament and shouted, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas!”
Ma has been credited with this goofy statement by New York Times columnist William Safire and Texas humorist Kinky Friedman, among others, none of whom has ever cited a source. Of course, that would be difficult. Ma Ferguson was a college-educated progressive, and it’s highly unlikely she said it. The yarn, in fact, dates to at least 1881, when Ferguson was six.
Republican president Calvin Coo lidge’s most famous line is “The business of America is business.” To this day, Democrats won’t give it a rest. Just last October, West Virginia senator Robert Byrd quoted it on the floor of the Senate. Did Coolidge really make the remark about the primacy of profit? The answer is, not really.
In a 1925 speech, Coolidge did utter these words: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.” But he was building to a different point—the opposite one: “Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. We want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.”
There’s another American trait that competes with idealism—and that’s our desire to sound hip and not overly sentimental, especially about our politics. Wasn’t it Harry Truman who casually dismissed his critics by stating that if you really want a friend in Washington, you should buy a dog? Actually, no. The line is fake, even though it’s often attributed to Truman. But President Obama still used it himself, although mercifully without blaming poor Harry. Appearing on The Tonight Show in March, the president said, “You know, they say if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
Yes, “they” do say that. But perhaps what they ought to say is, “If you want to help a friend in Washington, get him a reliable quote book.” That’s Ben Franklin.
Bob Hope is one of the world’s most recognizable and beloved comedians. From his numerous radio and television shows to his shows with U.S. Troops around the world and much, much, more, Hope put a smile on the faces of all those in his presence. Read on to enjoy some laughs, courtesy of Bob Hope. 