Everyone in the Basque village gathered at the local restaurant with the revolving door for the annual Egg Festival. The waitress entered the dining room with a large basket of eggs to be broken and fried. Suddenly a giant rat leapt out of the basket, frightening the Basques. They all ran to the revolving door and got stuck trying to get out at the same time. What is the moral of this story? ‒ NEVER PUT ALL YOUR BASQUES IN ONE EXIT.
What’s so funny about this? Here we go with another shaggy dog/pun story. I originally came across the joke in a book I’m reading and later discovered that, not surprisingly, there are many versions of the joke, though all have the same punch line. In most versions the Basques are trapped in a burning restaurant or theater or some big public place with only one door. As you can imagine, they don’t survive. There are plenty of real life stories of night club fires and the like, with gruesome endings and I didn’t think that was necessary for the joke to work. After all a shaggy dog story can really be of any length and topic as long as it eventually gets you to the punch line, so why be morbid? That’s why I changed the story and also made it about eggs. You’ll note that the picture also has a basket of eggs. This is actually a kind of spoonerism that may be difficult to catch because of the spellings, so I thought a little visual help was in order. There is, of course the famous proverb, saying, expression, etc. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” If we spoonerize “eggs” and “basket” and alter the spelling some, we get “Don’t put all your Basques in one exit.” Since the restaurant in the joke only had one exit, a revolving door, I got all the restaurant patrons piled on top of each other in the one exit. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
I read this old joke in the book “Accordion Crimes” by Annie Proulx
