“Have you heard the joke about the young couple on the way to church to get married when they were killed in a car accident? When they arrived at the pearly gates, the man asked St. Peter if he could find a priest to marry them before they entered heaven. St. Peter returned a year later with a priest. The man asked, ‘what if our marriage doesn’t work out? Can we get divorced in heaven?’ To which St. Peter incredulously replied, ‘it took me a whole year to find a priest in heaven. How long do you think it would take to find two lawyers?’ “

If you’ve visited Deering’s Meat Market on Union and 12th Street, you might have heard that one from Carl Ferguson, the bard of dirty jokes who works the till five nights a week, and has for the last 16 years. Ferguson has thousands of jokes in his repertoire. Ferguson treats nearly every Deering’s customer to a yarn.

“The dirty stories I tell the men, the clean stories I tell the women,” he explains. “Some women that enjoy so-called off-color jokes, I tell them, too.”

“People come in to hear stories. I generally have a new one to tell them.”

Ferguson, whose voice bares a slight resemblance to the late great Chicago journalist and storyteller Studs Terkel, credits his father for his humor.

“My dad told me thousands of stories. His memory was so good, he wouldn’t just tell me a story. He’d tell me who told it to him, and he’d tell me where they were when the story was told … I should have asked him what time of day it was!”

Ferguson was born and raised in Traverse City; he left when the economy tanked in the 1970s and worked for nearly 18 years in Louisiana. He had known the Deering family since 1954, when the store delivered meat to his father’s restaurant. The family decided to expand the store’s hours, and recruited Ferguson, who jumped at the opportunity.

“I wanted to come back here,” says Ferguson, who laughed when asked why. “There isn’t a better place on earth to live, as far as I’m concerned.”

Deering’s Market is a throwback to the days when village grocery stores were the norm. Back in the day, Ferguson explains, Oleson’s and Tom’s would close at 6pm, and wouldn’t open on Sundays. That created an opportunity for neighborhood stores that stayed open late every night.

“I like interacting with customers,” says Ferguson. “I like telling stories. I like the one-to-one contact. So many things are impersonal now, but not at Deering’s.”

As such, he’s become something of a fixture in Traverse City.

“If you like dirty old man jokes, Carl is your man,” writes one person on social media. “Ask Carl to tell you a joke. Just not the one about the breast augmentation,” writes another.

Have your own (ideally clean) Carl joke or story to share? Comment below.