Mayor Pays For Jokes About Town

[jeffrey]

When he's traveling on city business, Mayor Chris Koos carries around a $50 or $100 bill that he'll hand to anyone who comes up with a joke he hasn't heard about his central Illinois town where "Welcome to Normal" signs are about geography, not a state of mind.

"I still have the money," says Koos, mayor of this growing college town since 2003. "Sometimes when people make the same joke you've heard a thousand times, it gets old, but you try to play along."

Around Normal and in neighboring Bloomington, folks say they've heard all the wisecracks about a city that legend has it once combined with another uniquely named southern Illinois town for a newspaper headline that read "Normal man marries Oblong woman... Entire Story