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Registered: 28th Feb 01
Location: POAH
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His top 100
one-liners
BOB HOPE employed teams of joke writers to produce scripts for his appearances.
Bob would read all the scripts and pick the best jokes for a single monologue.
Here are 100 of his favourite one-liners.
1. I’m half British, half American. My passport has an eagle with a tea bag in its beak.
2. I came from a very big family. Four of us slept in the same bed. When we got cold, Mother threw on another brother.
3. Our neighbourhood was tough. We had the typical gang – Shorty, Fatso, Skinny, Stinky. Then there were the boys.
4. My early days in vaudeville were really tough times. I wouldn’t have had anything to eat if it hadn’t been for the audience throwing stuff at me.
5. I would have won an Academy Award if not for one thing – my pictures. Oscar night at my house was called Passover.
6. My secret for looking young is good food, plenty of rest and a make-up man with a spray gun.
7. I remember my staff asking me when I was going to retire. I said: “When I can no longer hear the sound of laughter.” They said: “That never stopped you before.”
8. The Vietnam war ended in an agreement neither side intended to honour. It was like one of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s weddings.
9. Some people claimed Ronald Reagan was too old to be President but I liked Ronnie. He’s smart, he’s honest and he’s the only ex-President who calls me Sonny.
10. I could never run for President. The money’s not right and anyway I don’t want to move into a smaller house.
11. Golf is my profession. Showbusiness is just to pay the green fees.
12. My father told me all about the birds and the bees, the liar! I went steady with a woodpecker until I was 21.
13. You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.
14. I see The Beatles have arrived from England. They were 40 pounds overweight - and that was just their hair.
15. I thought Deep Throat was a movie about a giraffe.
16. A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove you don’t need it.
17. She said she was approaching 40 and I couldn’t help wondering from which direction.
18. Where else but in America could the women’s liberation movement take off their bras, then go on TV to complain about their lack of support?
19. I feel very humble on being awarded a Congressional Gold Medal. But I think I have the strength of character to fight it.
20. Watergate gave dirty politics a bad name.
21. I always like to go to Washington DC. It gives me a chance to visit my money.
22. Dying is to be avoided because it can ruin your whole career.
23.My folks were English. They were too poor to be British. I still have a bit of British in me. In fact, my blood type is solid marmalade.
24. The last time I played golf with President Ford he hit a birdie - and an eagle, a moose, an elk, an aardvark ...
25. People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.
26. The good news is that Jesus is coming back. The bad news is that he is really p***ed off.
27. If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf.
28. It used to be if you tried to cross the Berlin Wall you could be shot at. In Los Angeles that happens if you try to change lanes on the freeway.
29. I’ve got to watch myself these days. It’s too exciting watching anyone else.
30. I need money. I have a staff of 30 and four houses – never mind the Government – to support.
31. Zsa Zsa Gabor got married as a one-off and it was so successful she turned it into a series
32. Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.
33. A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live.
34. I grew up with six brothers. That’s how I learned to dance – waiting for the bathroom.
35. Washington DC serves a very important function in our system of government. It keeps all the politicians in one place – where it’s easier to keep an eye on them.
36. I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. That’s when it’s time for my nap.
37. When she (Phyllis Diller) started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
38. Golf is a game that needlessly prolongs the lives of some of our most useless citizens.
39. Eisenhower admitted that the budget can’t be balanced, and McCarthy said the communists are taking over. You don’t know what to worry about these days –whether the country will be overdrawn or overthrown.
40. I have a wonderful make-up crew. They’re the same people restoring the Statue of Liberty.
41. There’ll always be an England – even if it’s in Hollywood.
42. If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
43. I do benefits for all religions. I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
44. At my age, wine, women and song have been replaced by prune juice, a heating pad and The Gong Show.
45. I consider myself very fortunate. I owe everything to my family and my make-up man. My wonderful family keeps me going and my wonderful make-up man keeps me from looking like I already went.
46. I have it on good authority that Senator McCarthy is going to disclose the names of two million communists. He has just got his hands on the Moscow telephone directory.
47. Students are revolting all over the world. I don’t know what they’re revolting about, I just know that they’re revolting.
48. A lot of people ask me how I stay in shape. I’ve got a new video coming out called The Bob Hope Workout Tape. If you do the exercises carefully, you’ll be laughed at wherever you go.
49. When they asked Jack Benny to do something for an orphanage, he shot both his parents and moved in.
50. There’s so many talk shows, they’re running out of applause machines. I may have to lend them the one I have over my bed.
51. I went to play golf and tried to shoot my age, but I shot my weight in pounds instead.
52. I used to keep my birthday a secret but I decided to stop – I wasn’t getting any presents.
53. I don’t believe in all that sexual permissiveness you hear about today. Maybe it’s because I’m at the age when my bag is my lunch.
54. It was a typically British birth. I was three at the time. They had a strike in the maternity ward. I came out in sympathy.
55. We were kind of poor and my mother hated to spend a nickel on herself, so she bought most of her things in an army surplus store. She was the only woman in Cleveland wearing khaki lipstick.
56. A rather chubby lady walked by and the panhandler went into his pitch. He said: “Ma’am, I haven’t eaten in three days.” She said: “Gee, I sure wish I had your willpower.”
57. I was well on my way to being a juvenile delinquent. When I was 16, I had more hubcaps than General Motors.
58. We never buy live turkeys at our house any more. One year I brought one home. The kids fell in love with it and I ended up putting it through Harvard.
59. In my lifetime I saw the Berlin Wall come and go. George Burns can say the same thing about the ice age.
60. It feels great to be nearly 100. I mean, for those parts of me that still have feeling. I do the same things I did when I was 50. I just take a nap after each one now.
61. When I went to do a show for the troops, the general in charge promised to keep a supply of my blood type on hand, even if he had to kill the chicken himself.
62. Out here in the Pacific, they have typhoons and hurricanes that blow over 200 miles an hour. We have tornados and hurricanes back home, but I don’t worry about them. The mortgage on my house is so heavy that nothing could budge it.
63. Sailors on shore leave spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats. Then they go to chapel on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
64. One sailor told me the pretty nurse on his ward really knows her job. “She takes our blood pressure and then deducts 20 points for White Dress Syndrome.”
65. I helped an old friend once when he was in a financial bind and he said he’d never forget my kindness. He didn’t. He’s in a bind again and he just called.
66. When young Judy Garland appeared on my TV show I asked her if she would feel at home. She said: “Oh yes, Mr Hope, you should have seen the strange creatures I worked with in The Wizard Of Oz.”
67. I used to box a little. In fact I ruined my hands in the ring. The referee kept stepping on them.
68. Meeting Bing Crosby was love at first sight. We started to insult each other from the moment we met.
69. The best way to look young is to hang out with older people. For me, that’s getting harder and harder to do.
70. I have performed for 12 presidents and entertained six.
71. The California Chamber Of Commerce is calling my appearance before the troops one of my victory tours. They said it was a victory to get me out of the state.
72. Here we are in the desert with nothing to drink. Water! Water! I didn’t pass water for three days.
73. President Gerry Ford is the man who made golf a contact sport.
74. Gerry is the most dangerous driver since Ben Hur.
75. Ford is easy to spot on the course. He drives the cart with the red cross painted on top.
76. Whenever I play with him, I usually try to make it a foursome – the President, myself, a paramedic and a faith healer.
77. One of my most prized possessions is the Purple Heart I received for all the golf I’ve played with President Ford.
78. Whenever I play with Ford these days I carry 13 clubs and a white flag. I try to win only enough from him to pay my extra insurance premiums.
79. Jimmy Stewart could have been a good golfer. But he speaks so slowly that by the time he yells “Fore!”, the guy he’s hit is already in an ambulance on the way to hospital.
80. Scottish caddies are great. One old fellow at St Andrews told me: “I had a golfer who was so lousy he threw his clubs into the water. Then he dived in himself. I thought he was going to drown but I remembered he couldn’t keep his head down long enough.”
81. I’ve played some strange rounds of golf in my travels. One course in Alaska was hacked out of the wilderness. My caddy was a moose. Every time I reached for a club he thought I was trying to steal his antlers.
82. I asked my good friend Arnold Palmer how I could improve my game. He said: “Cheat.”
83. The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight because by then your body and your fat are really good friends.
84. I was able to find my original birth certificate but it took three guys to help me get it. Stone tablets are heavy.
85. I was really good to my mother. Whenever there was any wood to be chopped, I’d run right out and sharpen her axe.
86. The word Father brings back a lot of memories to me. There were times when I couldn’t sit on those memories.
87. We could smell a cop a mile away – and vice versa.
88. My brother Fred and I were always trying to out-do each other. We’d have been sibling rivals except neither of us knew what that meant.
89. Golf is misery with a caddy.
90. Bowling has one advantage over golf – you rarely lose the ball.
91. What a place that North Africa is. I won’t say it’s dusty there, but it’s the only place I know where you spit cement.
92. We did a lot of flying over the Pacific and once we had to make a forced landing – that’s an aviation term meaning: “Why didn’t I go to church last Sunday?”
93. I’m really thrilled tonight, because they requested me to keep appearing before military audiences. The request came from civilian audiences.
94. I can’t say enough to you people who went in and bought copies of my book, Have Tux, Will Travel. And I’d like to say plenty to you people who didn’t.
95. Elvis is just a young clean-cut American boy who does in public what everybody else does in private.
96. It’s great to be here in Saigon. Saigon – that’s Vietnamese for “Duck!”
97. I called the draft board to ask what my number was. They said: “For which war?”
98. It takes Halley’s Comet 76 years to get here. Big deal – so does a home-delivered pizza.
99. We’re on our way to the Persian Gulf. It’s a mistake! I thought they said Persian Golf.
100. George Bush was brought up to be a politician. Before he learned to crawl, he already knew how to shake hands.
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