Congress

Making fun of lawmakers is a Shmoop specialty. So, first the definition, and then...the jokes.

Congress is that group of people that makes the national laws you live by. It makes up the legislative branch of the U.S. national government, one third (along with the executive and the judiciary) of the country's Constitutionally constructed co-equal branches of government (checks and balances and all that).

Congress consists of two parts. There's the House of Representatives. Everyone there gets elected every two years, and seats are given out based on the population of their state. The other part of Congress is called the Senate. Every state gets two senators. There are 100 senators total and 435 members of the House.

If you want to pass a law, you have to get it through both parts of Congress, though there are some specific rules about what each part can do. If the president (the head of the executive branch) likes the bill that's passed both houses of Congress, he or she will sign it. Then it's a law, and you have to follow it. If the president doesn't like a bill, then it gets vetoed. At that point, it's not a law. Congress can decide if they want to try to override the veto or start from scratch.

So...them's the basics. Now for the jokes.

The difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
-Will Rogers

The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver.
-Jay Leno

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer “Present” or “Not guilty.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
-Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain