Genesis of a one liner
Twitter is currently down, so I can't post the one liner I just came up with. Instead, I figured I'd use this space to show the thoughts that led to the joke. It started when I saw, on Facebook, that Mick Jagger just turned 69. The post included a picture. Skipping over the first glimmer of the sort of tasteless response that generally rises into immature minds (such as mine) in connection with that number, my first solid thought was, "He doesn't look a day over 80." Granted, that's fairly funny, but it is also fairly obvious. There will be countless variants offered by countless tweeters throughout the day (assumign Twitter comes back on line). My next though, as is often the case when years are involved, was to think about dog years. Again, a decent source of one-liners, but also fairly common. Then, it hit me that "stones" refers both to Mick Jagger's band and to a British unit of measurement. Eureka! (I wasn't sure how to spell "voila" or how to find that stupid accent character.) It all fell together around "stones." Double meanings are a rich mine for humor. Part of the laugh comes from the listener seeing the connections. My initial phrasing was "Mick Jagger turned 69 today, which is 97 when measured in British stones." This could definitely be tweaked for timing and rhythm. (Perhaps "..turned 69 years old today...") But you get the general idea.