The Best of President Reagan's Humor

I just want to... Oh, I can't resist. I'm supposed to quit right here. But, oh yes, but in view of the five things that I just said, I don't know whether you know it or not, but I have a new hobby. I am collecting stories that I can actually prove are told among the Russian people. They make them up themselves. They tell them between themselves. Reveals they've got a great sense of humor. And they've also got a little cynical attitude about things in their country. And one of these stories, the one I'm going to tell you, I told to General Secretary Gorbachev. And he laughed. The story was an American and a Russian arguing about their two countries. And the American said, look, in my country I can walk into the Oval Office, I can pound the President's desk and say, Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country. And the Russian said, I can do that. The American said, you can? He says, yes, I can go into the Kremlin to the General Secretary's office, pound his desk, and say, Mr. General Secretary, I don't like the way President Reagan's running his country. Mr. President, distinguished members of the Congress, honored guests, and fellow citizens, today marks my first State of the Union address to you, a constitutional duty as old as our republic itself. President Washington began this tradition in 1790 after reminding the nation that the destiny of self-government and the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty is finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. For our friends in the press who place a high premium on accuracy, let me say, I did not actually hear George Washington say that. I can define middle-aged. That's when you're faced with two temptations, and you choose the one that will get you home at 9 o'clock. The story of a realtor who was out driving on a back road on his way to look at some property and suddenly noticed down beside him was a chicken keeping pace with him, and he was doing 60 miles an hour. And suddenly the chicken spurted out ahead of him, and it looked to him as if the chicken had three legs. And then it turned and went down the sign road and into a barnyard, and the driver turned down that lane, drove into the barnyard. There was a farmer there, and he asked him, he said, Did you see a chicken go by here? And the farmer said, Yep. He says, Did it have three legs? And the farmer says, Yep. I raise them that way. I breed them. He says, You do? He says, How come? Well, he said, I just love the drumstick, and I've always liked the drumstick, and now Junior's come along, and he likes it, and we just got tired of fighting over it, so I've been breeding three-legged chickens. And the driver said, Well, how do they taste? He says, I don't know. I haven't been able to catch one yet. Now there's nothing I enjoy more than a little country humor. One of the great things about having you here is that I get to tell a farm joke. Now first I need a setting, but Rick, you're from Kansas, right? Okay, this takes place in Kansas. There was an old Kansas farmer there. He had a piece of creek-bottom land that had never been developed at all. It was all rocks and brush and all messed up, and he started in on it, clearing it, the underbrush, and hauling away the rocks, and cultivating the soil there, and he planted a garden, everything from vegetables on to corn, and it really became a garden spot. He was pretty proud of what he'd done. So one Sunday morning in church after the service, he asked the preacher if he wouldn't stop by to have a look. Well, the preacher arrived, and he took one look, and he said, Oh, this is wonderful. He said, These are the biggest tomatoes I've ever seen. Praise the Lord. He said, Those green beans, that squash, those melons. He said, The Lord really has blessed this place, and look at the height of that corn. He said, God has really been good. And the old boy was listening to all this, and he was getting more and more fidgety, and finally he blurted out, Reverend, I wish you could have seen it when the Lord was doing it by himself. And as he was falling, grabbed a limb sticking out the side of the cliff, and looked down 300 feet to the canyon floor below, and then looked up and said, Lord, if there's anyone up there, give me faith. Tell me what to do. And a voice from the heavens said, If you have faith, let go. He looked down at the canyon floor and then took another look up and says, Is there anyone else up there? I've always thought of the importance of communication and how much a part it plays in what you and I, what all of us are trying to do. And one day, a former place kicker with the Los Angeles Rams, who later became a sports announcer, Danny Villanueva, told me about communications. He said he'd been having dinner over at the home of a young ball player with the Dodgers. The young wife was bustling about getting the dinner ready. They were talking sports, and the baby started to cry. And over her shoulder, his busy wife said to the ball player, Change the baby. And he was a young fellow, and he was embarrassed in front of Danny, and he said, What do you mean, change the baby? I'm a ball player. That's not my line of work. And she turned around, put her hands on her hips, and she communicated. She said, Look, Buster, you lay the diaper out like a diamond. You put second base on home plate. You put the baby's bottom on the pitcher's mound. You hook up first and third, slide home underneath, and if it starts to rain, the game ain't called. You start all over. I don't have any words to properly tell you how bittersweet these days are and the things that we would like to say to all of you. You know, I keep remembering back, and not too far, when someplace along the line there would always be a picture of a president standing in the Oval Office looking out the window, usually the picture from behind, and he's standing there, and then his words are quoted as a tag for that picture about, This is the loneliest place, and so forth. I don't know about them. I haven't been lonely one minute.