One liners and the dawn of paperbacks

You see, during world War II we had to conserved unleaded gasoline, sugar and meat and kids were sent out to harvest milkweed seed pods to replace the kapok in life preservers. They also wanted to save paper, so paperback books came out, so that the soldiers could relieve their boredom with light-weight (Literally and figuratively) reading matter, hence paperbacks. One recalls Bill Mauldin's cartoon soldiers, Joe telling Willie, "You're carrying too much weight, Willie. Throw the joker out of your deck of cards."

So it was that yours truly, growing up on a farm near a township library, full of Zane Grey western novels and Nancy Drew for his female classmates, spent his first bit of discretionary income (5 cents a bushel for picking up the potatoes the machine had dug up or 25 cents a lug for picking cherries) for a slim book called "A Pocket Book( as they were called in those days) of Boners." This was a collection of schoolboy errors, many hilarious, which gave the writer small glimpses of the world of culture, which egged him on to a small amount of good stuff, along with shocking amounts of trash. These may sound like one-liners because of their terseness and hilarious impact. Some of the writer's favorites follow:

Woodrow Wilson believed in open convents openly arrived at.
King Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
Napoleon gave Josephine a jewel box with her entails carved on the lid.
In the French Revolution, many of the clergy and nobility were gelatined.
The followers of Christ were called the 12 opossums.
The epistles were the wives of the apostles.
Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backward.
The American Indian travelled in birchbark canoes on little streams of water, which they made themselves.
Queen Victoria was the longest queen on the throne.
Sir Walter Raleigh died in 1580 and started smoking.
Drake was playing at bowls when he was told the Invisible Armada was in sight.
Abraham Lincoln was shot by one of the actors in a motion picture show.
Syntax is the money collected by the catholic church from sinners.
Caesar was murdered by a group of contractors.
Rome was conquered by the Goths, the Visigoths and the osteopaths.
Martin Luther died a horrible death; he was excommunicated by a Papal Bull.