You can’t hide from The Joke Lady.

I met Marcie “The Joke Lady” Danyi of Niles by U.S. Postal Service back in 2020, shortly after some annoying virus was making its rounds in the news — and the world.

Marcie was 78 back then (“My mind still thinks I’m 25,” she told me. “My body thinks my mind is an idiot!”), and had already been working at her joke ministry for several years. And I had just made her list.

“You know you’re a bad cook when,” one of her mailings to me proclaimed, “you’ve used three boxes of scouring pads and a bottle of Drano and a crowbar, and that macaroni and cheese still won’t let go of the pan.”

Just because one is homebound with “a lot of physical” problems doesn’t mean one cannot get around and share sunshine and laughter. Not when that one is Marcie the Joke Lady, and she’s set with an ample supply of 6-inch-by-9-inch envelopes and a few sheets of stamps.

Packed in each envelope are several typewritten pages of clean, uplifting jokes for the collection that Marcie’s been amassing for half a century or so.

Six years and a lot of life later, I ended up in another state and Marcie has moved as well, at least temporarily. We lost touch.

But late last October, a familiar yellow envelope appeared in my mailbox. Marcie had found me with a full packet of jokes. Just below the return address, she had typed, “82 years old and still giggling.”

A couple weeks ago, another packet popped up. And I’m still giggling.

For those of you not on The Joke Lady’s mailing list, here’s a sampling of the ministry you’re missing from Marcie’s mass of material.

COMPUTER JOKES

• I tried to log in on my iPad. Turns out it was an Etch-A-Sketch. And I don’t own an iPad. Also, I’m out of wine.

• Our computers went down at work today, so we had to do everything manually. It took me 20 minutes to shuffle the cards for solitaire.

• I had to buy a desktop computer. I gained too much weight and I no longer have a lap for my laptop.

• Autocorrect makes me say things I didn’t Nintendo.

ERMA BOMBECK WISDOM

• Life’s too short to fold fitted sheets.

* No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

• The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with ONLY a loaf of bread are 3 billion to one.

• My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

HOUSEWORK JOKES

• I can’t believe it’s almost time to put off my spring cleaning until next year.

• A police officer radioed the station: “An old lady shot her husband for stepping on the floor that she just mopped.” “Have you arrested the woman?” “Not yet. The floor’s still wet.”

• A clean house is a sign of a broken computer (or phone).

AGING JOKES

• We all get heavier as we get older because there’s a lot more information in our heads. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

• When I was a kid, I wanted to be older. This is not what I expected.

• If things get better with age, then I must be getting close to magnificent.

• A man was arrested for selling “secret formula” tablets that he claimed gave eternal youth. It was the fifth time he’d be caught for committing the same medical fraud. He had been arrested in 1794, 1856, 1928 and 1983.

This concludes your Joke Lady sampler pack. Go and do thou likewise.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Trouble knocked on the door but, hearing laughter, hurried away.

Send silly lines to Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.