Present Tense Narration
Story Telling
Often when telling jokes or stories, we use present and present progressive tenses to recreate the event in an active manner.
Blonde
Joke
A blonde woman is driving her car home one night when she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a really bad hail storm. The hail stones are as big as golf balls and her car gets dented up really bad. The next day she takes it in to a repair shop to have the dents looked at.
The repair guy, noticing that she is blonde and quite dingy (not too smart) when she speaks, decides to have some fun and tells her to blow into the tail pipe of the car really hard when she gets home, and that doing this will cause all of the dents to pop out.
When she gets home she starts blowing into the tail pipe as hard as she can, over and over. Just then, her best friend, who also is blonde, shows up. Her friend sees her blowing into the tail pipe and is quite startled by the action. She blurts out, "What are you doing!?"
The first blonde tells the second blonde that the repair guy told her to blow into the tail pipe real hard and the dents would pop out.
Her girlfriend says "Duh ! You need to roll up the windows first!"
(Duh = everybody knows that; I'm not stupid)
Practice
Narrating a Joke
Change this story in past tense to present tense narration style:
A policeman stopped a man who was driving down the freeway in a station wagon, which was filled with swords. He asked the driver "What are you doing with all these swords?" The man answered "I am a "sword swallower" in the Circus Vargas. So, he showed the policeman by putting a sword down his throat. Just then, a couple was driving by and the wife said to her husband "Slow down Harry! Look what that officer is making that guy do because he was speeding!"
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