Prisoner 280 asked the headsman’s forgiveness for stepping on his foot, and she placed her head through the guillotine’s stock.
As the sentence was read aloud, she imagined her husband enduring this same insult nine months earlier.
Unlike the king, her head did not drop into the basket, but sailed over the crowd, spinning on to the cobblestoned street.
The town militia chased after it, but it soon rolled out of sight.
They tossed her body into an unmarked grave, which meant they never knew when it was dug back up.
The resurrectionist rubs his hands together, laughing with joy.
Tag: sick
Runaway Santa
When Christmas is over, we round up the Santas, herd them into trucks, and ship them back to the camps.
Radio tags help catch the strays.
We give each Santa a checkup, fix the damaged ones, and read through field reports that track which strains were effective where.
Beards by environment, bell-ringers versus department stores… we analyze everything.
This helps us plan our training and deployment strategy for the next holiday season.
And how to predict severe failures.
In the basement, the worst Santas are kept.
The molesters. The axe-murderers.
Oh no. The lock is broken?
Quick! Sound the alarm!
Checking it twice
Santa’s making his list, checking it twice.
Too bad for John Bettencourt (now known as Paul Miller of Orlando, Florida) that he doesn’t check with the Witness Protection Program.
John wanted chocolate-covered truffles from his favorite online catalog store, but instead of using a new shopper ID, he used his old one.
Santa didn’t notice. But the crooked defense contractor that John blew the whistle on did.
A box arrived the next day.
“Mmmmmmmm… truffles!” John said.
He opened it, setting off the parcel bomb.
It wasn’t reindeer on the rootops, but bloody bits of John raining down on them.
Ground Hog
It be Groundhog Day.
We has a special on groundhog burgers today.
What do it taste like?
I dunno, I ain’t tried one yet.
Go ahead. Try one. It on special, so it don’t cost much.
And you get fries and Coke. Free refills.
(The Coke, not fries. That extra.)
What you say? “This groundhog fresh?”
Course it’s fresh. Just runned them over with my truck this mornin’.
Even got one big sucker with my fender that some dude in the park was holdin’ up.
Yeah, the news say there’s six more weeks of winter comin’, but not for him.
Laminated
Flat Stanley became flat when a bulletin board fell on him.
You believe that he went on a series of wild adventures, right? Catching art thieves, sliding under doors, and mailing himself to far-off distant lands?
What really happened was a quiet, closed-coffin funeral.
His little brother Arthur was traumatized, shipped off to a mental hospital.
Every time his parents visited, he’d hand them another book he’d written about Stanley.
Alive. Adventuring.
Under his hospital bed, they found crushed and laminated mice.
“Experiments,” said Arthur, grinning
He escaped last night. Stole a steamroller.
Oh my God! The Mall!
Stop him!
Elves Live
Happy The Elf woke up in the North Pole Infirmary.
His head hurt. Everything looked weird.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You had a rough Christmas,” says the lab technicians, putting equipment on a cart. “Everyone did. But you’re all fine now.”
Happy looked around and saw all the other elves in the Infirmary, in various states of stupor and lucidity.
Santa watched them through a one-way mirror.
“Poor bastards,” he said. “They have no memory of the Hell I put them through every year.”
“And neither do you, you old bastard” said a technician, sliding a needle into Santa’s neck.
Pay The Price
I was losing my hearing, but I couldn’t afford the surgery to repair it.
So, I got financial assistance from a corporation.
Now, I can hear again, but I also hear advertising.
When I walk by a restaurant, their ad plays in my ear.
“Michael, you deserve a break today,” says the voice, calling me out by name.
I want the ads to stop, but my doctor says the cost of ad-free implants is not covered by my plan.
And under his Doctors Union contract, he can’t remove them.
So that’s why I’m here with the mirrors and the drill.
Sitting very still.
Trust Me
“If you love me, you’ll trust me.”
Ever hear that one?
I hear it all the time.
She comes home with a bow and arrow, wanting to put an apple on my head to shoot off.
Or a wheel to strap me to as she throws knives at me.
Then there’s our savings account. Every weekend, she wants to take it to Vegas with dreams of not leaving it all there as we hitch a ride back home.
Today, she’s cooking dinner.
She sets out a plate and smiles.
I take one whiff and…
“So, where’s the bow and arrow?”
Baby Brother
Lisa’s parents knew what would be on the Christmas List.
The same thing she’d asked for every year: a baby brother.
Her birth had been difficult. The doctors had performed a hysterectomy to stop the bleeding.
And her parents didn’t want to adopt or hire a surrogate.
“You’re plenty enough,” they said to Lisa.
So, she took matters into her own hands.
Sure, the paper said it was an electrical short from the tree.
Lisa said she saw smoke, rescued the neighbor’s baby first, couldn’t go back in because of the flames.
Just wait until she wants a baby sister.
Summertime
As you freeze your ass off in the dead of Winter, someone down in Australia is working on their tan in the peak of Summer.
The doctors look over your fingers to see how bad the frostbite damage is.
You’ll recover. Just get better gloves for the next time.
The Australian, however, won’t know about the spot on her back for months.
By then, it’ll be too late. The melanoma will have spread into her lungs and pancreas and…
It’s hard to dig a grave in winter.
What do you care? You’ll be on the beach, tanning.
Need some sunblock?