Free Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black

Henny Youngman. I’ll do ten minutes for a hundred dollars.’” He also did nightclubs (two hundred nights a year), the odd movie and a regular gig on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
    Youngman’s humour was rapid-fire, machine-gun style. His act was only fifteen or twenty minutes long but he could cram a hundred different jokes into that time frame. Nobody ever complained about the length of Youngman’s performances. Their sides were aching too much.
    Youngman’s wife, Sadie, was the butt of a lot of his jokes—including his trademark gag: “Take my wife—please!”
    He had others:
    â€œMy wife said to me, ‘For our anniversary I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before.’ I said, ‘Try the kitchen!’” Or: “Last night my wife said the weather outside wasn’t fit for man or beast, so we both stayed home.”
    In fact, Youngman was nuts about Sadie and she returned the ardour. They were married for over six decades and toward the end when her health declined he had an intensive care unit built into her bedroom because she was terrified of hospitals.
    Sadie died in 1987; Henny ploughed on for another decade, finally closing his remarkable one-man show in 1998 at the age of ninety-one.
    Henny could spark laughs anytime, anywhere from anyone, but it never went to his head. For Henny it was a job. “I get on the plane. I go and do the job, grab the money and I come home and I keep it clean. Those are my rules. Sinatra does the same thing, only he has a helicopter waiting. That’s the difference.”
    â€œKeeping it clean” was a big deal for Henny. I met a young comedian who got to sit beside him on an airplane once. The kid asked Youngman for his secret. “I keep it clean!” thundered Youngman. “All these young punks with their sewer mouths and their gutter jokes—stupid! Sure they get laughs but they don’t get asked back because they offend people who don’t like bad language. Best advice I can give you, kid—KEEP IT CLEAN!”
    Then without missing a beat, Youngman buttonholed the flight attendant and said: “Now where’s my #%$ing scotch?”

 
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    Caution: Boobs on Display
    G ot milk? You bet we have. More than six billion men, women and children drink that familiar white liquid produced from the glands of mammals every day on this planet. We downed 720 million tonnes of the stuff last year and there’s no sign that our thirst is slaked.
    And—aside from for those who are lactose intolerant—that’s a good thing. Human breast milk is tailor-made for tiny humans but milk products of all kinds are healthy and plentiful and we don’t just rely on two-legged mammals for our supply. We’ve guzzled our fill of milk from cattle, sheep, goats, yaks, water buffalo—even horses, reindeer and camels.
    As for how we get the milk from the gland to the customer, well, that’s changed a lot over the years too. I can remember when milk came to our doors in milk wagons hauled by patient, shuffling teams of horses. The one-quart bottles clinked and clanked as the wagon rolled along. Each bottle had a cardboard stopper and a tulip-shaped flare at the top, which is where an enterprising brat, if he tiptoed out on the porch early in the morning, could find the cream. Mmmmmm.
    The horses were eventually retired and the milk wagons morphed into milk trucks that performed the same function. Then some bean counter worked out that it would be more profitable to have the customers schlep to a store and pick up their own supply of milk. Adios, milk truck.
    The containers changed as well. The quart glass bottles were retired in favour of clunky, rigid polyethylene jugs, which in turn were replaced by soft plastic bags. After that came plasticized cartons in various sizes from quarter-pint (sorry, I’m a geezer)—all the way up to a two-litre version. I think that’s how