Using kid's jokes

Recently I’ve started using children’s jokes to study. When it comes to language studying, especially for lowish level people like me, jokes have a number of things going for them as far as I can see:

1. They are short.

2. They contain lots and lots of dialogues and useful everyday language.

3. They usually hold your attention to the end because you are waiting for the punchline.

4. You never get tired of jokes—even bad jokes are good if you know what I mean.


Here is an example of an amusing, bad joke I’ve just uploaded and studied in LingQ—complete with my dodgy translation:


谁是孩子的父亲？
Who is the child’s father?

迈克是学校的勤杂工。
Mike is the school’s handyman.

有一天正坐在家中，突然一只足球破窗而 入，打在他身上，
One day, when he was sitting at home, all of a sudden a football smashed through his window and hit him.

一个小男孩满头大汗跑进来，说：“sorry，我马上打电话叫爸爸来给你修。”
A small boy ran in with sweat pouring from his brow saying “Sorry, I’ll phone my dad immediately and get him to come and fix it.”

一小时以后，果然来了个大个子男人，
An hour later, as expected, a large man came.

手脚利索地把玻璃装好，
With nimble hands he fixed the window quickly

随后向史克要10美元材料费和工钱。
Then asked for 10 dollars for material costs and labour fee.

迈克惊异地说：“你难道不是孩子的父亲？”
Mike said with amazement, “Could it be you are not the boy’s father?”

来人也惊奇地说：“你难道不是孩子的父亲？”
To which the man also with amazement replied, “Could it be you are not the boy’s father?”

It’s a kids joke: it’s cheesy and old, but I like it. There’s plenty of useful language in there, and I wasn’t sure of the punchline until the end, so my attention was held—unlike a lot of language learning material you come across. (although I'm not sure why Mike has to be a handyman, when it's his window being fixed. Maybe I've missed something in the translation here?)

This is where I’ve been getting some Chinese kid’s jokes from, and I've been uploading them into LingQ and saving the vocab in there. If anybody knows of any other good resources it'd be good to hear about them.