When you contemplate the taxes you’re paying, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Definitions: The pessimist says things can’t get any worse. The optimist says, “Yes they can.”

This starts off my first annual joke column: I offer it as a public service as taxpayers painfully file their returns, and a tender mercy after my streak of about 100 serious columns. But Woody Allen’s riffs on death are all soberly nervous:

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. . . . I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. . . . I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” So the jokes I’ll tell must have a point as well.

For example, when I think of the disjunction between evidence of God’s power and our reactions to it, this story comes to mind: A grandmother is watching her only grandchild playing on the beach. A huge wave comes and yanks him out to sea. She pleads, “Please God, save my grandson.” Immediately a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, unharmed. But the grandma looks up to heaven and says angrily, “He had a hat!”

We so much like being the center of attention that we don’t realize our foolishness. Example: Three women are bragging about how much their sons love them. The first says, “My son bought me a new car.” The second says, “My son bought me a new house.” The third says, “That’s nothing, my son every week goes into a room, lies down on a couch, and talks only about ME.”

*****

Will this be the last annual joke column? We offer, you decide.
Marvin Olasky is Editor in Chief of World Magazine. His question above is a serious one. If you have a question or comment for Marvin Olasky, send it to [email protected].

READ MORE GREAT JOKES AND THE REST OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.worldmag.com/articles/16594