I think we could use a game to play tonight, so I've come up with one. It's called "If I had a nickel".
The rules are simple.
Every top level post should be entitled "If I had a nickel for ...".
Then, in the text of the top-level post, you put in the set-up to your joke.
So your post might read
If I had a nickel for
every time John Boehner cried in public ...
and then the response to that post gives the punch line.
People should give as many punch lines to each top level joke as they'd like. (Try to make them funny, though.)
But here's the trick: I suggest that as a matter of etiquette, you not be the one to reply first to your own top-level comment. That will make other people more likely to other people to play also.
So, for example, my tip jar reads:
If I had a nickel for ...
every page of a book by Gore Vidal that Michele Bachman ever read ...
To this, one might reply: "I'd almost be able to make change for a quarter." (I'm sure that there are funnier ones.)
As a hint: some jokes will be designed to say you'd have so much money, and some (like the above) so liitle money, and I suspect that there is a third and maybe a fourth category as well that I haven't thought of.
You get extra points (from me, at least, for all that's worth) for drawing someone or something unexpected into the joke, like: "the DSCC would finally give up and stop e-mailing me" or "I'd have to go back to sleeping on Christine O'Donnell's couch in exchange for giving her nightly 'massages'."
I have no idea how this will work, so let's find out!