Truly Tasteless Jokes - by Blanche Knott (1982)

Applewhite moved to New York City in 1977 to work for St. Martin's Press, where she learned numerous offensive jokes, which her boss encouraged her to write down. In a 2011 article in Harper's Magazine, Applewhite wrote that her collection of jokes quickly grew, and she would ask her coworkers and friends if they knew any others. Frustrated over her $8,500 annual salary as a lowly assistant, she decided to compile a book of the jokes to publish.

Applewhite asked a colleague to be her book agent, but their attempts to have the book published resulted in strong rejections; Applewhite recalled that her agent was told by Dell Publishing's paperback imprint that "We can't publish this here. I'm not even sure we can Xerox it."

I thought Blanche Knott was a gay man. I loved those books, they were vile .

How do you fit 100 dead babies into a Volkswagen?

La Machine.

How do you get them out?

A straw.

R3 Sick and funny, but that joke has dated references a lot of young people won’t understand.

I remember this book was popular but many people thought it was horrible and racist, sexist, etc., everything bad. For obvious reasons. This just made more people want to read it. It’s like it was forbidden. The term “politically correct” didn’t exist back then.

I remember our family had a copy of this book and we would take turns reading it to each other in the station wagon when we would drive anywhere.

How do you make a dead baby float? Ice, root beer and 2 scoops of dead baby.

Truly Tasteless Jokes: The Trump Years in the White House, 2017- 2021.

How do you seat 4 gays on a bar stool? Turn it upside down.

I didn’t understand a lot of them but as a teen in the 80s the gay jokes were one of the few sources of any kind of insight into that world I had. Offensive but also educational

A gay man came home early from work to find his boyfriend going through his private things.

“You’re a pedophile!” Screamed the boyfriend.

“You’re awfully nosy for a thirteen-year-old.” Replied the gay man.

Why did Helen Keller’s dog kill itself?

You would too if your name was, “Nrlrughuu.”

Not funny. Sorry old asses.

Burn every copy!

Dead baby jokes never get old!

I remember my German teacher telling some "totes Baby" joke a few years after that.

We had this along with the Book of Lists and the People’s Almanac and other 1970s bookshelf fixtures. Although I think this may have been kept in the john. It was a fave when I was 12 and I would read the dead baby stuff aloud to my eldest sister, who was a young mom. She did not enjoy it.

I want to read it