The World According to Student Bloopers

    Richard Lederer
    St Paul's School

One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is
receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay.  I have
pasted together the following "history" of the world from certifiably
genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United
States, from eighth grade through college level.  Read carefully, and
you will learn a lot.


The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies.  They lived in
the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.  The climate in the Sarah is
such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of
the dessert are cultivated by irritation.  The Egyptians built the
pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube.  The pyramids are a
range of mountains between France and Spain.

  The Bible is full of interesting caricatures.  In the first book of
the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.  One
of their children, Cain, once asked, "Am I my brother's son?"  God asked
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma.  Jacob, son of Isaac,
stole his brother's birth mark.  Jacob was a patriarch who brought up
his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it.  One of
Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

  Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw.  Moses
led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is
bread made without any ingredients.  Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount
Cyanide to get the ten commandments.  David was a Hebrew king skilled at
playing the liar.  He fought with the philatelists, a race of people who
lived in biblical times.  Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives
and 500 porcupines.

  Without the Greeks we wouldn't have history.  The Greeks invented
three kinds of columns-- Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic.  They also had
myths.  A myth is a female moth.  One myth says that the mother of
Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intollerable.
Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer.  Homer also wrote The Oddity,
in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his
journey.  Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of
that name.

  Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people
advice.  They killed him.  Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

  In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits,
and threw the java.  The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.  The
government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into
their own hands.  There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so
high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were
doing.  When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered
because the Persians had more men.

  Eventually the Ramons conquered the Geeks.  History calls people
Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.  At Roman
banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair.  Julius Caesar
extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul.  The Ides of March
murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king.  Nero
was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the
fiddle to them.

  Then came the middle ages.  King Alfred conquered the Dames, King
Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harold mustarded his troops
before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard
Shaw, and victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks.
Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged
twice for the same offense.

  In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.  The greatest
writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also
wrote literature.  Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow
through an apple while standing on his son's head.

  The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of
their human being.  Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at
Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences.  He died a horrible death,
being excommunicated by a bull.  It was the painter Donatello's interest
in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance.  It was
an age of great inventions and discoveries.  Gutenberg invented the
Bible.  Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented
cigarettes.  Another important invention was the circulation of blood.
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

  The government of England was a limited mockery.  Henry VIII found
walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee.  Queen Elizabeth
was the "Virgin Queen".  As a queen she was a success.  When Elizabeth
exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, "hurrah".  Then her
navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

  The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear.
Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his
plays.  He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies,
comedies, and errors.  In one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet
rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy.  In
another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by
attacking his manhood.  Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic
couplet.  Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel Cervantes.
He wrote Donkey Hote.  The next great author was John Milton.  Milton
wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

  During the Renaissance America began.  Christopher Columbus was a
great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.  Later, the
Pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this was known as Pilgrims Progress.
When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by the Indians, who
came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them.  The Indian
squabs carried porpoises on their back.  Many of the Indian heroes were
killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them.  The
winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers.  Many people died and
many babies were born.  Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

  One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks
in the tea.  Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the
post without stamps.  During the War, the Red Coats and Paul Revere was
throwing balls over stone walls.  The dogs were barking and the peacocks
crowing.  Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay
for taxis.

  Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented
Congress.  Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two
singers of the Declaration of Independence.  Franklin had gone to Boston
carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each
arm.  He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared, "A
horse divided against itself cannot stand".  Franklin died in 1790 and
is still dead.

  George Washington married Martha Curtis and in due time became the
Father of our Country.  Then the Constitution of the United States was
adopted to secure domestic hostility.  Under the Constitution the people
enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

  Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest precedent.  Lincoln's mother
died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his
own hands.  When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat.
He said, "In onion there is strength".  Abraham Lincoln wrote the
Gettysburg Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the
back of an envelope.  He also freed the slaves by signing the
Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the
ex-Negroes citizenship.  But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch
the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims.  It claimed it represented
law and odor.  On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the
theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving
picture show.  The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a
supposingly insane actor.  This ruined Booth's career.

  Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time.  Voltare
invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy.  Gravity was
invented by Isaac Walton.  It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn, when
the apples are falling off the trees.

  Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel.
Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English.  He was very
large.  Bach died from 1750 to the present.  Beethoven wrote music even
though he was deaf.  He was so deaf he wrote loud music.  He took long
walks in the forest, even when everyone was calling for him.  Beethoven
expired in 1827 and later died for this.

  France was in a very serious state.  The French Revolution was
accomplished before it happened.  The Marseillaise was the theme song of
the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon.  During the
Napoleonic wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their
shoes.  Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and nipped at
Napoleon's flanks.  Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was
very tense and unrestrained.  He wanted an heir to inherit his power,
but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear children.

  The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is
in the East and the sun sets in the West.  Queen Victoria was the
longest queen.  She sat on a thorn for 63 years. Her reclining years and
finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality.
Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

  The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and
thoughts.  The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to
spring up.  Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the
work of a hundred men.  Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy.
Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.  Charles Darwin was a
naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species.  Madman Curie discovered
radium.  And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

  The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a
surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.

.

This is really funny, but a lot of it  seems too clever to be real mistakes

like... "then his wife died and he wrote paradise regained" and so many others

These sound like Mad Libs.  :)

Just submitted a parody of some of this information, to the Major- General's Song.  ;)

I agree, some of these are too intelligent to have been accidental. Funny nonetheless.

The government of England was a limited mockery

Was????

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea.

Yep... sounds like something we'd do.

Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence.

Is that on AmIRight?

This was hysterical, JD! 

pr  :D

I replaced the earlier version with a better-quality copy...it's widely available on the web.

This most recent copy is from:

http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/w/c/wchuang/www/humor/college/student_bloopers.txt

So far as I know, these "Student Bloopers" are real --- Richard Lederer published them many years ago.

But even if Richard secretly embellished some of them, who cares?  They're hilarious!  And a potential goldmine of parody ideas ...

Here is mine:

http://www.amiright.com/parody/misc/gilbertsullivan44.shtml

"Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton.  It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn, when
the apples are falling off the trees."

Love it.  Hilarious, JD!

Thanks everybody, glad you're getting a kick out of it!

My personal favorites include the one EmiLoca quoted, plus these:

"Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. "

"Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper."

"Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men."

"Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf.  He was so deaf he wrote loud music."