After the King James Bible and Judy Blume’s Forever, which respectively served as the imprimatur for my troubling moral rigidity and taught me everything I needed to know about sex, no book has exerted quite so profound an impact on my development as has Julius Alvin’s indispensible compendium, Gross Jokes.
This delightful piece of Americana is a relic of a bygone age. Its anachronistic offensiveness harkens back to an era in which the culture hadn’t yet discovered its inner pussy or began to counter the messy inclusiveness of wide-ranging speech with an antiseptic circumspection and a compulsion for self-censorship bordering on mania. Nowadays, the list of lifestyles and affiliations which can be safely mocked has dwindled to near-insignificance.
Gross Jokes is, if not a breath of fresh air in these stuffy times, then at least a pungent fart in society’s plastic-lined cleanroom. Dedicated to Helen Keller (she’ll apparently be reading the audio version, which has been re-titled Y34jk3k Bdkddd for the occasion), and with chapter headings such as Revolting Racial and Ethnic Jokes, Vulgar Cripple Jokes, Indecent Religious Jokes, Foul Homosexual Jokes, Lewd Senior Citizen Jokes and Simply Disgusting, Gross Jokes is clearly something special.
Very few of the jokes contained in this volume are suitable for print even in these pages. It is a testament to the power of Gross Jokes that a significant portion of its contents offends even our attenuated sense of propriety. However, to give you an idea of the range and beauty of this masterwork, we present the following excerpts: