In the Bronx you hear that old side-splitter from Zambia about the reluctant debtor trying his best to hide from the neighborhood loan shark behind the short curtain that divides traditional one-room homes, his toes poking out.

“He’s out for the day,” the debtor’s wife says.

“Well, next time he goes out,” the loan collector says, “he should take his feet.”

In Flushing, Queens, you might hear the one about a little Chinese boy who sets off his family’s stockpile of ceremonial fireworks in his home, sending his puzzled neighbors running over to see what life event the traditional rockets are memorializing. “No ceremony now,” the little boy says. “But when my dad gets home from work, it will be my funeral.”

Or you might hear an ethnic twist on another classic, like one a Palestinian-American comedian, Dean Obeidallah, who performed over the weekend at an Arab and South Asian comedy show, offered in an interview: “Take my land, please!”