The Funniest Joke of All Time

So have you heard the joke about the broom? It’s sweeping the nation. Okay, that’s a little lame. But who doesn’t love a good joke? A man once asked me, “What’s the funniest joke ever?” I had no idea. But here’s a good candidate: I was walking past the asylum and I heard the inmates chanting, “Thirteen, thirteen.” I looked through a hole in the fence and some guy poked me in the eye with a stick. I walked away and heard them chanting, “Fourteen, fourteen.” Believe it or not, researchers in England embarked on the noble quest to discover the world’s funniest joke. They examined more than 1,000 jokes before whittling them down to a final 50 and getting 36,000 people to vote for their favourites. Here are a few of the top jokes:

Number 34: A man entered a local paper’s pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did. Get it? No pun in ten did?
Number 25. A guy sent his girlfriend a huge pile of snow. He gave her a call the next day and asked, “Did you get my drift?” And the funniest joke in the world? A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: “That is the ugliest baby I have ever seen!” She stomps to the rear of the bus and sits down fuming. “The driver just insulted me!” she says to a man sitting next to her. The man says: “Get up there and tell him off right now. You go, I’ll hold your monkey.”

Did you ever forget a punch line? I did this once on national television. But here’s the world’s greatest punch line. I hope you’ll never forget it. It can lift your spirits when you’re lonely or discouraged. It can cause a grin to morph into a smile and even turn into a laugh. God loves you. The creator of the universe is wild about you. Right now. Today. Not some future version of you when you get your act together or sit in church with a cheesy smile. You are forgiven. You are called His child. He was even thinking about you before time began. Listen to this: “Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:4-5).

Like a broom in a snowstorm, this news should sweep the nation. If you catch my drift.