This was posted by Steve Poge in alt.humor.puns. Another version can be found in “Bred Any Good Rooks Lately.”
When my father retired, he needed something to keep him busy. Being of good voice, he decided to join a choir. My mother, suspecting he was doing this just to meet younger women, agreed, but just as long as it was an all male group. After an extensive search he found the only all male choir in the state. This group was constantly trying to recruit new members. In addition, it had a strange philosophy about keeping the voice healthy — they believed that consumption of a certain brand of diet soda and a particular fruit were very necessary for them to continue singing well.
Not surprisingly, they call themselves “The More Men Tab And Apple Choir.”
An alternative (and I think considerably older), politically incorrect version of this story is by Annie Dillard in “Bred any good rooks lately?”.
A fellow went to Julliard, studied composition. He wanted to be a composer, but after he graduated, he saw there was no future in it, so reluctantly he took the only music job he could find, which was as a singing teacher at a school for retarded children.
He very much liked working with these kids, and after the first few years he had developed a top-notch singing group. This group became famous and toured the country. In city after city, the little kids would sing and the people would applaud andthe mayor would have them all over to his house for Coke, ice cream and cake.
Unfortunately after several months of this, the kids started getting fat. Their singing teacher knew they’d lose their popularity if they got fat, so he had to put a stop to it. he began telling the mayors and their hosts wherever they went on tour, “Look, I know the kids are cute and you want to do something nice for them, but they’re getting a bit overweight, so if you want to give them a treat after the concert, give them a Tab, give them an apple, but please, no more ice cream and cake.”
Wherevere they toured, their hosts agreed to this mild request. And from then on they were known as the
Moron Tab and Apple Choir.