____I’ve been telling this story for years now. Usually folks find it funny and easy to understand. I was recently encouraged to use it in the Humorist segment of the Toastmasters meeting. I did that and managed to flub it.
Here’s the Story:
____Back when I was in my twenties, we knew a guy who got convicted of armed robbery with a screwdriver. We decided to write him a letter to cheer him up. While we wondered if his mail got censored at all, I figured that it’d be hilarious to censor the letter ourselves.
____So, in the letter I first wrote a fairly innocuous story and then I used a razor to cut out some of the words to make it look much dirtier than it was. I then turned the paper over and wrote another story using the cut out spaces to have the same effect. We sent the letter off, hoping that our buddy would find it as funny as we did.
____It didn’t go the way that we expected. Our buddy got the letter, assumed that the guards had done the censoring and got into an argument with them. The upshot of this is that he wound up with 4 days in “the hole” and lots of time to reread the letter and hopefully find the humor in it.
How I flubbed it:
____When I agreed to do the humorist segment I figured that there’d be the usual crowd of 6-10 people. Instead, the place is packed to the rafters with 25-30 people. I got more nervous and my polysyllable count shot up.
____Instead of saying “I cut out the words and made it look dirtier,” I said “I excised the words and made it look more salacious.” Some folks laughed, others wondered what excised and salatious meant.

Darnit!