More of the Diary Of A Young Girl

At long last, we have confirmation that EVERYONE likes a good off-color joke. Even the ones that aren't all that funny have an audience somewhere.

I'm not close friends with any of the hierarchy of the world's great religions, but I'm sure that even at the conclaves of spiritual leaders, someone is bound to tell the one about a nun, a priest, an Irishman, a Scotsman, a rabbi and a blonde walking into a bar.

The final domino fell when it was revealed that Anne Frank wrote dirty jokes and thoughts about sex and prostitution in the very diary that schoolchildren have been reading since the 1940s. I mean, they were mild jokes, certainly not like the one about the female patient and the psychiatrist's couch, but they were salty. (I won't put that on one here, but will share it with you if you private message me.)

Prior to publication in 1947, remember, it was in fact the diary of a young girl, and when Anne wrote down the jokes in September, 1942, she said, "I'll use this spoiled page to write down 'dirty' jokes." That was just two months after she went into hiding.

Researches display the newly-shown pages

One of the jokes is actually an American classic dating back to the days of vaudeville, told over and over with minor changes. She wrote it this way: "A man comes home at night and notices that another man shared the bed with his wife that evening. He searches the whole house, and finally also looks in the bedroom closet. There is a totally naked man, and when that one man asked what the other was doing there, the man in the closet answered: 'You can believe it or not but I am waiting for the tram.' "

(The alternate punch line is "Everybody's gotta be somewhere!")

She had a couple of other old gags, and some words about sex, female reproductive health, and prostitution, and as much as I have always respected Anne Frank, well, it just went up a hundredfold.

And she covered these two pages up by pasting brown paper over them, but thanks to modern image processing, we see behind the plain brown wrapper that Anne was just like any other girl, or boy. I guess I was about her age when I found that my generation did not make up all that salty language we were spouting off on the way to school.

Things don't change.

"Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile. The 'dirty' jokes are classics among growing children," said Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands' Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl."

Anne in 1942

And Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, says, "Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way. Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject. She also writes about it on other, uncovered pages," said . "They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank."

Unlike most 14-year-olds, Anne was self-conscious enough to re-read her diary entries and amend them as needed, and that seems to be why she covered these "naughty" pages. She said all throughout her diary that she was worried about people reading her words.

Imagine that. 35 million copies have been sold and read by an incalculable number of people. RIP, Anne. Love you even more every day!