The Joke Lady — 82 and still giggling
By Burton W. Cole
This inscription was typed just below the return address label on the yellow 6-by-9 envelope: “My mind still thinks I’m 25. My body thinks my mind is an idiot.”
Even without the label, I knew immediately what I’d found in my mailbox — another thick packet of giggles from a friend I’ve never met in person, Marcie Danyi, “The Joke Lady.”
• Youth and talent are no match for age and treachery.
• When I was a kid, I wanted to be older. This is not what I expected.
• Laughter is an instant vacation.
She’d also typed on the envelope, “82 years old and still giggling.”
Health issues have troubled Marcie for years. While she was homebound, she knew that the U.S. Postal Service was not. Armed with a stack of envelopes, sheets of stamps and 50 years of collecting jokes, she began what she calls her “joke ministry.”
• Cats probably think we are cleaning our ice cream cones.
• We all get heavier as we get older because there’s a lot more information in our heads. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
• Laughter is the shock absorber of life’s blows.
After a hospital stay, Marcie’s in a nursing home now.
“When do you get to go home?” I asked during a phone call.
“I don’t,” she said.
Instead of curling into a fetal position and giving up at such a devastating reality, Marcie made it her mission to keep her fellow residents and staff in stitches. She has plenty of material.
Take tax time for example. Here are some taxing jokes from her files:
• I tried to pay my taxes with a smile, but they kept insisting on money.
• A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
• It’s getting to the point where you need more brains to make out the income tax forms than to make the income.
Danyi added me to her growing mailing list about five years ago. The recipients of her joke packages of jokes include police and fire departments (“What award do you give a firefighter? Most extinguished.”), officials, business people and pretty much anyone who pops into her head.
Marcie told me that she’s amazed at how God used a “common, ordinary homebound person who never really went anywhere to brighten the days of so many people from coast to coast.” It’s her calling, she said.
“It is better to be faithful than famous,” she typed at the bottom of one of her sheets of jokes. Even if the calling is just to make people laugh. She often adds Proverbs 17:22A to her missives: “A cheerful heart is good medicine.”
Or, as Charlie Chaplin said, “A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
• “Doctor, I’ve swallowed a spoon.”
“Sit down and don’t stir.”
• “Doctor, I have trouble breathing.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll give you something to stop that.”
• You know you’re a bad cook when… Your microwave display reads, “TILT.” …Pest control companies keep pestering you for your recipes. …You use the smoke alarm as a cooking timer.
• Autocorrect makes me say things that I didn’t Ninetendo.
• A clean house is the sign of a broken computer.
• Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people seem bright until they speak.
• I do dinner in three phases: Serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead. — Phyliss Diller
• Life’s too short to fold fitted sheets. — Erma Bombeck
Marcie once told me that lifting spirits and caring about others is wonderful — and something that more people ought to take seriously.
After all, as The Joke Lady noted on one of her sheets of good, clean jokes, “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
Share jokes with Burt at news@falmouthoutlook.com, or more importantly, with your neighbors, coworkers, the lonely and anyone God puts in your path who needs a lift.