Sermon Illustrations
BLOOPERS in History
​
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 trav-
eled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that
the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas
of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyp-
tians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge trian-
gular 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. Socra-
tes 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 govern-
ment 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 extin-
guished 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 con-
quered 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 Ber-
nard Shaw, and victims of the Black Death grew
boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided
that no free man should be hanged twice for the same
offense.
​
In midevil times most of the people were alliter-
ate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who
wrote many poems and verses and also wrote litera-
ture. 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 indi-
viduals 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 impor-
tant invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis
Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.
The government of England was a limited mock-
ery. 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 Wil-
liam Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money
and is famous only because of his plays. He lived at
Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, com-
edies, 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 Shake-
spear 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 Para-
dise Regained.
​
During the Renaissance America began. Christo-
pher 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. Cap-
tain John Smith was responsible for all this.
​
One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was
the English put tacks in their 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 Decla-
ration 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 rub-
bing 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 rep-
resented 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 Revolu-
tion, 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 person-
ality. 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 steam-
boat 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.