Why Did the Cheese Cross the Road?: Pandemic Humor from Salt Spring Island

How many 'wheys' can cheese make us laugh?

A favorite food around the world, makers of cheese must have learned long ago that their work had a comedic life of its own! This is nowhere more evident than when you unite cheese with word play. For, in addition to being a marvelous product shared by cheeseheads seemingly everywhere, an increasingly valuable by-product of cheese making is whey. Indeed, when you combine cheesey cheese jokes with other word play and mix in some cheesey geography - as I do here to illustrate cheese's international scope - you find that you soon have a chapter on 'whey' itself (not to mention its cousins in the name of cheese humor, 'way' and 'weigh'). So as I serve up the funny side of cheese here, don't simply "say cheese." Rather, please remember to let yourself laugh - and laugh lots because one good cheese joke deserves another!

Dr. Lawrence T. Woods is a retired political science professor and cheesemaker who lives with his wife, Sue, their dog, Norah, and their cat, Missekatt, on Salt Spring, the largest of Canada's Gulf Islands, off the southern coast of British Columbia. In yet another career change, he now serves as a support worker assisting a group of very special adults as they seek to find their "whey" amidst the pandemic humor of this pandemic world.