Life & Place · A Decembers list
The jokes you've told a hundred times and never get tired of
There's the one your father delivered at every cookout, the same pause before the punchline. There's the one you learned in a barracks or a break room and have been telling ever since. You know exactly where the laugh lands.
This is the list for those jokes. One line to set it down, or a few when you want to remember where you first heard it and why it stuck.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the punchline and the whole thing comes back — who told it first, the room it was told in, the face they made right before the last line.
Nobody writes down the jokes. They live in the delivery, in your timing, in the way you lean back before the last line. Official records hold your name and your dates; the family stories hold the big moments. But the joke you've been telling since 1972 — the one that's practically yours now — that lives only as long as you keep telling it. Set it down and you keep the whole thing: the wording, the setup, the reason it works when you tell it.
A joke book about your own jokes would never get written; it sounds silly even to try. But one line at a time is easy. You jot the joke, and while you're at it you note where you first heard it and who from. That's the part worth keeping — not just the gag, but the barbecue, the road trip, the friend who's gone now whose voice you still hear in the setup. The list grows a joke at a time, and each one carries a whole scene back with it.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The jokes that keep coming back
The ones you inherited
The joke your grandfather told at every Thanksgiving, word for word, until you could mouth it along with him. You tell it now, a little differently, and people who never met him laugh at his joke. Writing it down keeps his timing alive alongside yours.
The ones you picked up along the way
From a coworker at the loading dock, a buddy in the service, a stranger at a bar in a town you passed through once. You don't remember his name but you remember the joke perfectly. Half the fun is recalling exactly where it came from.
The ones that are just yours now
The bit you've polished over forty years until nobody knows where it started. The pun you can't resist, groans and all. The one your kids beg you not to tell and you tell anyway. These are as much a part of you as your handwriting.
By the kind of joke it is
- The long story
- The shaggy-dog kind that takes five minutes and half its charm from watching people wonder where it could possibly be going.
- The one-liner
- The quick jab you keep loaded for the right moment, delivered deadpan so half the table catches it a beat late.
- The groaner
- The pun so bad it's good, met with eye-rolls you secretly count as a win every single time.
- The clean one
- The joke safe for the grandkids, the church picnic, and the boss — your reliable everywhere joke.
- The blue one
- The one you only tell after the kids have gone to bed and the second pot of coffee is on.
- The inside joke
- The one that only lands with people who were there, and stops being funny the second you have to explain it.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of what made you laugh, and what you made others laugh with
These are the jokes that outlast the telling. Start with the one you told last week — the setup, the punchline, and where you first heard it.