Influences And The Influencers Who Influence Them

I used to work with a guy that was probably the greatest joke teller in the world. His name is Ken D. and he has a way of delivering a punch line that will just knock your socks off (Why do we say that? I mean, I know that it means something so great that you just can’t believe it but if you didn’t grow up speaking English it’s gotta be a pain listening to some of these idioms.). It took him a couple of tries before he realized that there were some jokes I just really did not want to hear, but after he had tested me a time or two and realized I was serious, he changed the way he did things. He would be telling a joke to a group of folks and if I walked by he would say, “Herb, just a minute, you really don’t want to hear this one.” Then he’d finish telling his story to that group and get a laugh and then he’d call me over and say, “Okay, herb. Here’s one you can even tell your pastor…” And he was right. He would tell some of the funniest jokes you ever heard and clean as a whistle. I appreciated Ken’s respect as well as his sense of humor. I was thinking about him the other day when I was talking about a couple of other blogs I used to have. I had one called “Herb’s Humor with the tagline, Jokes so clean you can tell your pastor.” A slightly modified version of this very paragraph was tacked at the top of the blog.

Now I have plenty to do to just maintain this one blog and I incorporate my humor and things I find funny into posts as time permits. I have a lot more followers these days as well as a lot less time, so everything gets dumped here. Who was Ken D.? A maintenance guy at big-name insurance company where I worked over twenty years ago. What would he think about having been an influence on me? He’d probably laugh and crack a joke about it, likely thank me for saying nice things about him.