Do you get the joke below, and if you do what is your age? (Leave your answers in the comments below.)
Here’s the joke: when we’re listening to the news and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s name is mentioned, Fratguy says to me, “and Bread.” And I laugh my a$$ off!
Does anyone else find this funny? Or are we just out of our apparently still six- and three-year-old minds? (That’s how old we were for most of 1972.)
Did this band every make any songs that weren’t annoying? I challenge you to name just one!
Historiann 
I didn’t actually get the joke, but I guessed it, if that makes sense. I’m vaguely familiar with the Bread oeuvre, and assumed that was the lead singer’s name. Rock doesn’t get much softer than that.
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It was David Gates and I got the joke. My private joke is Neil Conan (?). I always add O’Brien or The Barbarian. And by the way, 64
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Am unfortunately aware of Bread and can sing perhaps two or three songs. Had no idea of any band members’ names. Born in ’67 but two older brothers who were teenagers in 1972. I’ma gonna need a nap if I have to listen to the Guitar Man track again, though.
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I had no clue! Though I’ve heard of Bread. But I wasn’t born til 7 years after 1972.
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I hate Bread so didn’t even listen to this. Oh yeah, and I just turned 47.
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Did not get the joke and had to look up Bread on Wikipedia. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard one of their songs before, though the name sounds vaguely familiar. Born in 1985.
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Didn’t get the joke (b. 1974), but I am very familiar with the record “The Best of Bread” (owned by my father, god only knows why.) That said, “It Don’t Matter to Me” is teh awesome.
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We were ALL three that year, Historiann, and the whole world was an elevator. I’m almost getting nostalgic for hating on it, and hoping for a Jefferson Airplane reunion tour. Back then, I mean.
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p.s. Maybe you know a good “Volunteers of America” joke?
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Although it too is annoying, “Diary” has some redeeming value. Words + tune = treacle, and historians here can probably confirm that no diary has ever been found “underneath a tree,” the better to rhyme with “meeee.” But after all those song lyrics extolling violent jealousy, I give Gates a couple of points for saying that the woman he’d been with is not his property.
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@LadyProf. Yeah, In noticed that one of the comments under the Youtube itself says something of the same thing about the last point, in a bit courser language.
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@Indyanna Way to put Historiann’s back against the wall. That said, we can be together on this Bread thing.
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For me Bread is this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/bread/
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Hey, kiddo, watch it! I was nine in ’72. I even owned a cassette of their greatest hits. (Not an 8-track, sorry to say.)
But, yeah, I snorted at the joke!
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Did not get the joke or even know the band that sang this song, although once I clicked on your link it came back to me as a strongly repressed memory filed under “Bad Music of the 1970s.”
Every time I see “Gates” something in a headline, my first reaction is “Bill? Bill Gates is going to donate his fortune to get us out of this mess?”
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@ Western Dave: Oh, I get it. Volunteers of America. Up against the wall…. Running a little slow these days, the moreso each decade we go back. I didn’t even get a riff off my own joke.
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@Indyanna I did twenty minuntes on Jefferson Airplane in my 60s class last year. With a special emphasis on the Volunteers album and the controversy around “We should be together” and then paired it with the Ballad of the Green Berets. So it was relatively fresh in my mind.
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