Gallows humor

The mood on Wall Street is somber these days, but the recent market mayhem nonetheless has been fodder for amateur and professional wags who have found a humorous, if not silver, lining in the meltdown.

With a crisis that has led to shotgun sales of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, the near collapse of American International Group and the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual Inc, hundreds of jokes are doing the rounds on blogs, late night comedy shows and email.

Here are some samples:

Question: Define a Balance Sheet.

Answer: There are two sides to a Balance Sheet: the Left & the Right (Liabilities and Assets respectively). On the Left side there is nothing right.

On the Right side, there is nothing left.

(Doing the rounds on email)

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Question: How many stock brokers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Two … one to change the bulb, the other to sell off the old one at the highest price possible before CNBC reports that it’s burned out.

(On the Freakonomics blog of the NY Times Website)

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Henry Paulson was out jogging without his guards.
All of a sudden a man with a ski mask jumped out from behind some bushes with a gun.
The masked man said “Give me all your money!”
Unwilling to do so, Paulson said, “You can’t do this, I’m the treasury secretary!”
The man then replied,… “Oh, never mind then.
Give me MY money!”

(Also on the Freakonomics blog of the NY Times Website)

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“The economy looks bad. Give you an idea how bad things are, my ATM machine now has a slot-machine lever on it.”

(Jay Leno on NBC’s “Tonight” show)

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“How bad is our economy? Well, I’ll give you my two cents, which used to be a dollar.”

(Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report on Comedy Central)

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The New Yorker also devoted the cartoons in its Oct. 6 issue to the fallout from the crisis.

In one, a woman at a cocktail party asking a balding man wearing a pinstriped suit, “A banker, eh? Can you make a living at that?”

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In a series of cartoons doing the rounds on email, one illustration shows Wall Street executives jumping out of windows and landing on a huge mattress of money labelled ‘U.S. Treasury.’

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Times are pretty bleak…but laughter, they say, is the best medicine. Want to add your own laugh-line to the list? Post it in the “comment” section below.