NILES — Miss Marcie, “The Joke Lady” from Niles, wants you to know that brightening someone’s day isn’t a complicated mission. Simply think about someone else.
“I have a lot of physical problems. When you think of others, you work beyond that and get blessed at the same time,” said Marcie Danyi, who declined to have her photo taken because of illness.
For several years, Danyi has been mailing 6-inch-by-9-inch envelopes to people she knows and to people she doesn’t. Packed in each envelope are several typewritten pages of clean, uplifting jokes culled from the collection she’s been amassing for that last 40 or 50 years.
Pages are headed with such quotes as “Laughter is the shock absorber of life’s blows” and “Laughter is, and will always be, the best form of therapy.”
Even the envelopes are inscribed with words of encouragement. In her neat, almost calligraphic printing, Danyi writes beneath the return address label, “The Joke Lady — 78 1/2 and still harmless.” A common phrase on the backside: “You matter to God … and to others.”
Danyi said she’s amazed at how God can use just a common, ordinary homebound person who never really went anywhere to brighten the days of so many people from coast to coast.
“This is your calling,” a niece in Washington state wrote. “You make us laugh and put a smile on our faces.”
Her mailing list includes the Niles police and fire departments (“What award do you give a firefighter? — Most extinguished”), a great deal of the businesses in town and “anybody who pops into my mind.”
Danyi said the world would be a brighter, happier place “if people would just pay attention to their neighbors, anybody they can think of, especially those who live alone.”
A NILES GIRL
Danyi was born and raised in Niles. “I love this town.”
She said her career consisted of office work and “anything that needed to be done.”
“I worked for an electrical contractor, and the guys would come in at night and drop everything on the floor,’ she said. “I would sort them out. What a mess.”
Another job memory: “I owned one of the first Mustangs in 1965. I had a pink and white Mustang. I worked for a trucking company back then. I let one of the parts guys go to lunch in it.”
He pulled up to a light and a truck driver looked down at him and shook his head. “Really?”
Danyi gets a kick out of that story. And it proves that a person who is hesitant to begin a joke ministry for lack of fancy and finessed material is missing the point. Anyone who can see the humor in daily life and ordinary situations can bless someone else’s day, she said.
MINISTRY OF MIRTH
The joke ministry “started out as making posters in 2016 for Sparkle Market. I wanted to do something for the workers,” she said.
But the roots were set long before then.
In the 1980s, she started a Scripture card ministry to people in her church.
Later, she wrote letters to prison inmates. “That was fear and trembling,” she said.
She notes she neither writes her own material nor is a performer, but sometimes the situation calls for it.
“I spent a lot of time in nursing homes with a couple of aunts and a cousin. At lunchtime, they’d bring them in, and they’d sit around staring at each other. It was boring,” she said. “I dug out my jokes and started reading.”
“Normally, I’m a serious person. This is my alter ego, I guess,” she said.
As illnesses kept her at home more and more, the ministry shifted to the U.S. Postal Service.
In December, she sent an apologetic letter to one of her “subscribers” after having to take a break because of health issues flaring up: “I haven’t given up, but I have slowed down quite a bit. Still, I continue to search for jokes (an obsession!) with the hope that I can continue to organize them and get them typed.”
She loved to collect quips, quotes and conundrums. Labeled file folders stashed in a storage box are stuffed with decades’ worth of stories and gentle humor.
“Now I’m hooked up to the internet. Now I can find jokes by category,” she said. “With a category, you can find specific jokes.”
Her firefighter friends receive firefighting humor while a joke packet for a plumber friend is stuffed with silly stories that relate to him.
“I pay attention to what people say,” she said. A person who mentioned a new cat received a packet that included three pages of cat jokes, plus a comic strip clipping about cats.
Among the cat quips:
“Cats probably think we are cleaning our ice cream cones.”
“What did the cat say after eating two robins lying in the sun? ‘I just love baskin’ robins.'”
“It’s my dog and cat’s world. I’m just here to open the cans.”
It’s not just jokes. A person talking about Vietnam received a 30-year-old magazine article she saved on the topic. Yes, she saves interesting stories, too.
Lifting spirits and caring about others is wonderful, she said.
“People just need something different in their lives,” Danyi said.
INSPIRATION
Her favorites to binge-watch on YouTube include humorist and former Miss North Carolina Jeanne Robertson and Christian comedian Dennis Swansberg. She admires both the humor and the Southern accents. She also loves pulling up videos of comedians Michael Jr., Jeff Foxworthy and Mark Lowry.
One of her heroes is Phyllis Diller, who was born in 1917 in Lima.
“Phyllis’ 53,000 jokes, on 3-by-5 index cards, in a steel cabinet with 48 drawers, were donated to the Smithsonian museum,” she said.
Some of her favorite Diller lines:
“Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people seem bright until they speak.”
“I do dinner in three phases: Serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead.”
“I spent seven hours in a beauty shop — and that was just for the estimate.”
Danyi also draws inspiration from her faith, which she also loves to share in her mailings.
“I want to get some Scriptures in them, very simple verses on God’s comfort, God’s presence,” she said.
As it is, the footnote at the bottom of most pages of jokes is this: “A cheerful heart is good medicine …” Proverbs 17:22A.
She said she’s disappointed that many churches seem to have slacked off on the Biblical command to care for orphans and widows, and to meet needs.
She’s grateful for her task and the help she receives doing it.
“I’m a project person, always have been all my life,” she said. “I keep wondering, is this what the Lord wants me to do?”
It all can seem so trivial, she said. But the response from her day-brighteners assures her that she’s following the correct course.
“Four different people sent me a total of 11 books of stamps for Christmas. Awesome. I’m thankful for the support,” Danyi said.
So she keeps thinking of others, keeps sorting through her files for cheerful heart medicine and keeps sending envelopes.
“I just wish I could see their smiles,” she said.
The Link LonkJanuary 30, 2021 at 01:38PM
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'Joke Lady' sends smiles in envelopes | News, Sports, Jobs - Warren Tribune Chronicle
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