Deep Thoughts

By Jack Handey

Whenever I need to "get away," I just get away in my mind. I go to my imaginary spot, where the beach is perfect and the water is perfect and the weather is perfect. The only bad thing there are the flies. They're terrible!

If you work on a lobster boat, sneaking up behind someone and pinching him is probably a joke that gets old real fast.

Instead of a Seeing Eye dog, what about a gun? It's cheaper than a dog, plus if you walk around shooting all the time people are going to get out of the way. Cars, too!

The first thing was, I learned to forgive myself. Then, I told myself, "Go ahead and do whatever you want, it's okay by me."

Do you know what happens when you slice a golf ball in half? Someone gets mad at you. I found this out the hard way.

Instead of a trap door, what about a trap window? The guy looks out of it, and if he leans too far, he falls out. Wait. I guess that's like a regular window.

A man doesn't automatically get my respect. He has to get down in the dirt and beg for it.

I don't think I'm ever more "aware" than I am right after I hit my thumb with a hammer.

If your kid makes one of those little homemade guitars out of a cigar box and rubber bands, don't let him just play it once or twice and then throw it away. Make him practice on it, every day, for about three hours a day. Later, he'll thank you.

Marta said I don't seem to like to read fiction very much. "I guess you're not an `afictionado'," she said. Poor Marta. For all her reading, she doesn't even know the right word.

In weightlifting, I don't think sudden, uncontrolled urination should automatically disqualify you.

It's too bad that whole families have to be torn apart by something as simple as wild dogs.

I wish scientists would come up with a way to make dogs a lot bigger, but with a smaller head. That way, they'd still be good as watchdogs, but they wouldn't eat so much.

I bet a fun thing would be to go way back in time to where there was going to be an eclipse and tell the cave men, "If I have come to destroy you, may the sun be blotted out from the sky." Just then the eclipse would start, and they'd probably try to kill you or something, but then you could explain about the rotation of the moon and all, and everyone would get a good laugh.

Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.

Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.

If you're a boxing referee, it's probably illegal to wear a bow tie that spins or changes colors.

It's probably not a good idea to be chewing on a toothpick if you're talking to the president, because what if he tells a funny joke and you laugh so hard you spit the toothpick out and it hits him in the face or something.

You can't tell me that cowboys, when they're branding cattle, don't sort of "accidentally" brand each other every once in a while. It's their way of letting off stress.

If I ever do a book on the Amazon, I hope I am able to bring a certain lightheartedness to the subject, in a way that tell the reader we are going to have fun with this thing.

There should be a detective show called "Johnny Monkey," because every week you could have a guy say "I ain't gonna get caught by no MONKEY," but then he would, and I don't think I'd ever get tired of that.

I remember when I was in the army, we had the toughest drill sergeant in the world. He'd get right up next to your face and yell, and if you didn't have the right answers, mister, you'd be peeling potatoes or chainging the latrine. Hey, wait. I wasn't in the army. Then who WAS that guy?!

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.

It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

If you're a cowboy, and you're dragging a guy behind your horse, I bet it would really make you mad if you looked back and the guy was reading a magazine.

Here's a good joke to do during an earthquake: Straddle a big crack in the ground, and if it opens wider, go "Whoa! Whoa!" and flail your arms around, like you're going to fall in.

How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn't have that dangerous beak.

When you go ice-skating, try not to swing your arms too much, because that really annoys me.

I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people.

If you ever teach a yodeling class, probably the hardest thing is to keep the students from just trying to yodel right off. You see, we BUILD to that.

If your friend is already dead, and being eaten by vultures, I think it's okay to feed some bits of your friend to one of the vultures, to teach him to do some tricks. But ONLY if you're serious about adopting the vulture.

Why do the caterpillar and the ant have to be enemies? One eats leaves, and the other eats caterpillars. Oh, I see now.

Whenever anyone says "I can't," it makes me wish he'd get stung to death by about ten thousand bees. When he says "I'll try," five thousand bees. ("I can," one bee.)

You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who makes people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.

If you were a gladiator in olden days, I bet the inefficiency of how the gladiator fights were organized and scheduled would just drive you up a wall.

When the age of the Vikings came to a close, they must have sensed it. Probably, they gathered together one evening, slapped each other on the back and said, "Hey, good job."

If you're an archeologist, I bet it's real embarrassing to put together a skull from a bunch of ancient bone fragments, but then it turns out it's not a skull but just an old dried-out potato.

If you ever reach total enlightenment while you're drinking a beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose.

I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff, then when somebody comes up act like they just woke up and go, "What was THAT?!"

Whether they ever find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet.

You know what's probably a good thing to hang on your porch in the summertime, to keep mosquitoes away from you and your guests? Just a big bag of blood.

If you wear a toupee, why not let your friends try it on for a while? Come on, we're not going to hurt it.

If someone told me it wasn't "fashionable" to talk about freedom, I think I'd just have to look him square in the eye and say, "Okay, YOU TELL ME what's `fashionable'." But he won't. And you know why? Because you can't ask someone what's fashionable in a smart-alecky way like that. You have to be friendly and say, "By the way, what's fashionable?"

If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn't open, and your friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming.

After I die, wherever my spirit goes, I'm going to try to get back and visit my skeleton at least once a year, because, "Hey, old buddy, how's it going?"

I bet a funny thing about driving a car off a cliff is, while you're in midair, you still hit those brakes! Hey, better try the emergency brake!

I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then after you camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science?

If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance.

Even though I was their captive, the Indians allowed me quite a bit of freedom. I could walk about freely, make my own meals, and even hurl large rocks at their heads. It was only later that I discovered they were not Indians at all, but dirty clothes hampers.

If I was a father in a waiting room, and the nurse came out and said, "Congratulations, it's a girl," I think a good gag would be to get real mad and yell, "A girl!? You must have me mixed up with THAT dork!" and point to another father.

I hope they never find out that lightning has a lot of vitamins in it, because do you hide from it or not?

When people say that the desert is lifeless, it just makes me want to grab them by the collar and yell, "Why you stupid, stupid bastard!" Then I drive them out into the desert to where the circus is, and point out the many forms of zebra and clown life.

Most of the time it was probably real bad being stuck down in a dungeon. But some days, when there was a bad storm outside, you'd look out your little window and think, ``Boy, I'm glad I'm not out in THAT.''

I think there probably should be a rule that if you're talking about how many loaves of bread a bullet will go through, it's understood that you mean lengthwise loaves. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

Broken promises don't upset me. I just think, why did they believe me?

I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching.

If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised.

I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away.

Some folks say it was a miracle. Saint Francis suddenly appeared and knocked the next pitch clean over the fence. But I think it was just a lucky swing.

The old-timers around here still shake their heads and chuckle about that city slicker who came through, trying to peddle "hair restorer." He took everyone's money in a poker game, so when he tried to sell the bottles of hair restorer, nobody had any money left to buy it!

I remember how my Great Uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off the paint.

If I was the head of a country that lost a war, and I had to sign a peace treaty, just as I was signing I'd glance over the treaty and then suddenly act surprised. "Wait a minute! I thought WE won!"

One thing about my Aunt Nadie: She was gruff on the outside, but if you ever needed something, like a spanking or a scolding, she'd give it to you.

As the evening sun faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.

I think that a hat which has a little cannon that fires and then goes back inside the hat is at least a decade away.

The old pool shooter had won many a game in his life. But now it was time to hang up the cue. When he did, all the other cues came crashing to the floor. "Sorry," he said with a smile.

Today I accidentally stepped on a snail on the sidewalk in front of our house. And I thought, I too am like that snail. I build a defensive wall around myself, a "shell" if you will. But my shell isn't made out of a hard, protective substance. Mine is made out of tinfoil and paper bags.

As we were driving, we saw a sign that said "Watch For Rocks." Marta said it should read "Watch For PRETTY Rocks." I told her she should write in her suggestion to the highway department, but she started saying it was a joke---just to get out of writing a simple letter! And I thought I was lazy!

I wish I lived on a planet that had two suns---regular sun and "rogue" sun. That way, when somebody asked me what time it was, I'd say, "Regular time?" And they'd say, "Yeah." And I'd say, "Sorry, all I have is rogue time." It'd be fun to be a stuck-up rogue-time guy.

Too bad there's not such a thing as a GOLDEN skunk, because you'd probably be PROUD to be sprayed by one.

Basically, there are three ways the skunk and I are a lot alike. The first is, we both like to spread our "stink" around. The second is we both get hit by cars a lot. The third is stripes.

Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that' s what her dinner tasted like.

If I ever become a mummy, I'm going to have it so when somebody opens my lid, a boxing glove on a spring shoots out.

Here's a good tip for when you go to the beach: A sand dollar may look l ike a nice cracker that someone left, but trust me, they don't taste like it.

For mad scientists who keep brains in jars, here's a tip: Why not add a slice of lemon to each jar, for freshness.

If you go flying back through time, and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it's probably best to avoid eye contact.

Can't the Marx Brothers be arrested and maybe even tortured for all the confusion and problems they've caused?

I guess the hard thing for a lot of people to accept is why God would allow me to go running through their yards, yelling and spinning around.

If any man says he hates war more than I do, he better have a knife, that's all I have to say.

Whenever someone asks me to define love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy's arm behind his back. NOW who's asking the questions?

One day one of my little nephews came up to me and asked me if the equator was a real line that went around the Earth, or just an imaginary one. I had to laugh. Laugh and laugh. Because I didn't know, and I thought that maybe by laughing he would forget what he asked me.

If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness.

What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to save a solid-gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.

Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again.

If you see an animal and you can't tell if it's a skunk or a cat, here's a good saying to help: "Black-and-white, stinks all right. Tabby-colored, likes a fella."

To me, it's always a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?," you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks."

I'd like to see a nature film where an eagle swoops down and pulls a fish out of a lake, and then maybe he's flying along, low to the ground, and the fish pulls a worm out of the ground. Now that's a documentary!

If you had a school for professional fireworks people, I don't think you could cover fuses in just one class. It's just too rich a subject.

Children need encouragement. So if a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way, he develops a good, lucky feeling.

Instead of burning a guy at the stake, what about burning him at the STILTS? It probably lasts longer, plus it moves around.

It seemed to me that, somehow, the blue jay was trying to communicate with me. I would see him fly into the house across the way, pick up the telephone, and dial. My phone would ring, and it would be him, but it was just this squawking and cheeping. "What?! What?!" I would yell back, but he never did speak English.

If I come back as a horsefly, I think my favorite thing would be to land on someone's lip. Even if they smash you, ick!, you're all over their lip!

I wish I could shrink down to the size of an ant. And maybe there would be thousands of other people shrunken down to ant-size, and we would get together and dig tunnels down into the ground and live there. But don't ever call us "ants," because we hate that.

Isn't it funny how we'll look out the window at the moon, and then we notice it's not the moon but a streetlight? Also what's funny is how we do this every night.

When this girl at the museum asked me who I liked better, Monet or Manet, I said, "I like mayonnaise." She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder. Then she left. I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me.

Sometimes you have to be careful when selecting a new nickname for yourself. For instance, let's say you have chosen the nickname "Fly Head". Normally, you would think that "Fly Head" would mean a person who had beautiful swept-back features, as if flying though the air. But think again. Couldn't it also mean "having a head like a fly"? I'm afraid some people might actually think that.

If there was a big gardening convention, and you got up and gave a speech in favor of fast-motion gardening, I bet you would get booed right off the stage. They're just not ready.

If I ever opened a trampoline store, I don't think I'd call it Trampo-Land, because you might think it was a store for tramps, which is not the impression we are trying to convey with our store. On the other hand, we would not prohibit tramps from browsing, or testing the trampolines, unless a tramp's gyrations seemed to be getting out of control.

You know some thing that would really make me applaud? A guy gets stuck in quicksand, then sinks, then suddenly comes shooting out, riding on water skis! How do they do that?!

A good way to keep a mob of peasants from killing your monster is when they break into your castle, make them be real quiet, then open a door and there's the monster, sound asleep.

As the light changed from red to greeen to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.

Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, mankind should be thinking about getting more use out of the weapons we already have.

If there's ever an amusement park called Bag World, I bet it would really start to annoy you after a while how they really sort of stretch the definition of "bag."

I think when you go on trial they should have a parrot there that says guilty or not guilty for you, as a sort of courtesy.

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, it's made up of two separate words---"mank" and "ind". What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.

Like jewels in a crown, the precious stones glittered in the queen's round metal hat.

To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I can't remember, all rolled into one big "thing." This is truth, to me.

I don't pretend to have all the answers. I don't pretend to even know what the questions are. Hey, where am I?

I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he'd spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell out, "Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!" We all thought he was crazy. But then, we had some growing up to do.

Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don't know what your rights are, or who the person is you're talking to. Then, on the way out, slam the door.

I hope that after I die, people will say of me: ``That guy sure owed me a lot of money.''

Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus's-flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like ambition.

People laugh when I say that I think a jellyfish is one of the most beautiful things in the world. What they don't understand is, I mean a jellyfish with long, blond hair.

I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed psychiatrist is our "friend."

Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk.

To us, it might look like just a rag. But to the brave, embattled men of the fort, it was more than that. It was a flag of surrender. And after that, it was torn up and used for shoe-shine rags, so the men would look nice for the surrender.

Many people never stop to realize that a tree is a living thing, not that different from a tall, leafy dog that has roots and is very quiet.

If you ever crawl inside an old hollow log and go to sleep, and while you're in there some guys come and seal up both ends and then put it on a truck and take it to another city, boy, I don't know what to tell you.

When you go to a party at somebody's house, don't automatically assume that the drinks are free. Ask, and ask often.

To me, there's no better symbol for the world than a grasshopper lying dead on a gravel road, and maybe there's a globe lying next to him.