It’s Friday… time for a bit of punishment. No full-blown jokes today, just a few bad puns:

Back during the Cold War, a circus from Czechoslovakia was touring Western Europe. One of the clowns, a midget, decided that he wanted to defect. Slipping away from the group, he escaped to the U.S. Embassy. When the guards at the gate asked him his purpose, the midget replied, “I just wanted to know if you could cache a small Czech.”

A zoo keeper discovered that if he fed his porpoises seagull, they lived forever. One day, as he was making his way to the porpoise cage with their daily lunch, he discovered that two of the lions had escaped. His fellow keepers had shot the lions with tranquilizer darts, and the felines were sleeping soundly, right by the door of the porpoise enclosure. Not wanting to keep his clients waiting, the keeper stepped over the beasts on his way to feed the porpoises. Later that day, he was arrested for transporting gulls across staid lions for immortal porpoises.

The concept of dividing the globe into longitudinal strips to establish time zones was first proposed by Sweden’s Alex Andersrag. Few people today remember that these zones were once known as Alex Andersrag Time Bands.

The chess convention participants were arguing long and loud in the hotel lobby, disputing which of them had played the greatest games of all times. Finally the manager threw them out, saying, “No one wants to hear chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”

Had enough?