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Mission funny man posts joke a day for entire year

Daryl Derksen posts 365 one liners to sometimes overly serious neighbourhood Facebook page
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Daryl Derksen said people’s attention spans are short, so kept the jokes short and simple, and making people groan is half the fun.

Daryl Derksen had been saving his monkey joke for the end. On the very last day of 2021 – a year filled with fires, floods, a pandemic and capped off with a snowstorm – he posted.

“A woman gets on a bus with her baby.

The bus driver says: ‘Ugh, that’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen!’

The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming.

She says to a man next to her: ‘The driver just insulted me!’

The man says: ‘You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I’ll hold your monkey for you!’”

Derksen laughs re-telling it. With that, he had successfully posted a silly joke every single day in 2021 to the sometimes overly serious Mission Neighbours BC Facebook page.

At first he said he didn’t think he would find it all that difficult, but in the final stretch, around mid October, he said he started to struggle.

He still had a bag full of dirty jokes, but had intended from the start to “know your audience” and keep it clean and simple for the over 25,000 members of the popular neighbourhood Facebook page.

“It was some stretch work at the end there,” Derksen said. “Ironically, it was a joke in and of itself to see if I actually had that many jokes.”

He said that people’s attention spans are short, so kept the jokes short and simple, and making people groan is half the fun. He threw in “a couple duds” before the grand monkey joke finale.

“That was one of my all time favorites. I love that joke.”

He said he got a bit emotional writing up the final post. What started out as a simple goal to challenge himself to come up with daily one-liners, eventually helped him “fire up” for more challenging goals in his future.

The 39-year-old former chef has left the restaurant industry after two decades, found a new job and is making more money than he ever has. He says he misses the kitchen work and people, but not the hours or the pay.

“It was a big change,” he said. “I put a lot on my plate this year, but if I can do a joke a day then I can do these other goals that are only three to six months long.

“It took me maybe five minutes out of my day, every day … Now, if I can do five minutes there every day, why can’t I do 10 minutes of this other thing?”

Derksen said that while he’s not retired from his joke posting, he might take a break for a couple months.

Later that day, he posted another joke.

RELATED: Have you heard the one about … ?


@portmoodypigeon
patrick.penner@missioncityrecord.com

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