Rudolph Herzog: "Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead"

[tongodeon]

Yesterday on NPR they interviewed a German named Rudolph Herzog who wrote the book "Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead", a collection of jokes that the German people told about Hitler while he was in power

Comments

[mmcirvin]

"A hippie, a priest and Richard Nixon are the last three people in a plane that's going down. There are only two parachutes. Richard Nixon says, 'I'm the smartest man in the world, so for the benefit of humanity, I'm going to take a parachute.' He jumps. The priest says to the hippie, 'Go, my child, take the last parachute--your whole life is ahead of you.' The hippie says, 'No sweat, padre, the smartest man in the world just jumped out of the plane wearing my backpack.'"

I heard it in this form on a school bus around 1976. In the 1990s, I heard it with Newt Gingrich swapped in.

[tongodeon]

I'm wondering what version they told in the 40s before hippies were invented.

[mmcirvin]

I suppose a young GI would work just as well.

[mmcirvin]

Google "smartest man in the world" + backpack

Smartest men in the world also include lawyers, Bill Gates, and some unnamed guy who just claims to be the smartest man in the world. The hippie is sometimes a punk, a little girl or a Boy Scout (a dramatized form of the joke seems to be a mainstay of Boy Scout talent nights).

[jwgh]

Yeah, I always heard the boy scout version (and various people in the role of 'smartest man in the world').

[mmcirvin]

...also, the kindly priest is sometimes the Dalai Lama, and, surprisingly, in one instance, the kindly President of the United States. There's one version in which the role is played by the pilot, who offers to fight the kid for the last chute. But more often the pilot is among the one or more superfluous personages who jump with additional remaining parachutes before the smartest man in the world makes his move.

[mmcirvin]

...using "knapsack" reveals a mention of a Henry Kissinger variant as "the original version", which of course it probably was not.

[mmcirvin]

also one with "a computer whiz", probably a genericized Bill Gates. The joke turns out to be a popular element of sermons as well; I even found a reference to it turning up in someone's memorial service.