IF: cultivate

Spread the love

This week’s Illustration Friday challenge word is “cultivate”.
Stop me if you heard this one.

In the nearly thirty years that I have known my father-in-law, he has told me this joke countless times. Whenever a piece of conversation triggers something in his memory that reminds him that this joke would be an appropriate anecdote, he delivers it as though it was the first time anyone has ever heard it. Of course, it is best told in a stereotypical Yiddish accent, which my father-in-law masterfully parrots.

It goes sort of  like this:

A teacher calls on a little boy in a classroom and asks him to use the words “commercial” and “cultivate” in a sentence. Herschel, the offspring of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, stands up proudly, clears his throat, and announces to the teacher “Vun day, ven I vas vaiting mit mine mother for de bus und de vind vas blowing und de snow vas blowing, she says to me ‘Come ‘erschel, it’s too cul-ti-vate’ “.

(Say it out loud a few times using the accent. You’ll get it.)

Comments

comments

10 Comments

  1. Dear Josh, that was a cute drawing of Bubbie Sadie and little Laybish. That is a story from his Yeshiva days and I have heard it many times over 55 years as well as many others. Ya gotta give him credit for not giving up the old jokes from the old days. So be prepared for many more. Keep laughing???? or grin and bear it…….M-I-L

Leave a Reply