My Grandfather's Favorite Joke

You never think that your grandparents were once young, at least when you are young yourself. However my mother's father was young at one time, and the glimmers of his younger days would creep through in stories in which he usually referred to himself as "an observer."
He was a civil engineer, and oddity in the 1920's being a college graduate from the University of Connecticut in 1912. After working for several railroads and the United Fruit Company in Jamaica he ended up working for the Maine Highway Department, surveying and planning the roads that would push through the distant farmlands and forests to connect Maine's far flung towns. Often the survey crews were gone for weeks at a time, particularly in the winter, when travel home was impossible and they would be holed up in some northern town where the sole source of entertainment was the bar in the local "hotel." Many hotels in Maine, back in the day, were just bars with a few cots upstairs so that they could meet the letter of the law and sell hard liquor. I stayed in one such hotel back in 1964, but that is another story for another time.
At any rate, to fight boredom, the crew would invent things to do, and sometimes form "societies" and "clubs" which required an initiation, something the founders never did themselves, and the new guys were none the wiser. One such club was the Order of the Burning Straw. The initiate, probably well oiled by the time, would be required to drop his pants and hold a broom straw between the cheeks of his butt while it burned down to a stub.
But I digress. I remembered Poppa's favorite joke the other night just as I was falling asleep, and my chuckling forced my long suffering wife to ask why I was laughing at such an odd time.
The story goes as follows: There once was a medical student, who was prone to wild binge drinking, which usually left him hurling violently and then comatose. His friends admonished him telling him that some day he would "puke his guts out."
One weekend came, and after a particularly spectacular spewing event, he passed out. His fellow students went to the lab, and brought back some preserved intestines and organs, which they had been studying, laid them around the inebriate and left.
The next morning he appeared ghostly white and said, "You fellows were right. Last night I threw up my guts, but with the aid of God and a long handled tooth brush I got them back in."