My misguided attempt at humor

I've been working on this speech for my CEO, who likes to include African proverbs in her remarks. She's talking about redesigning the work environment as a strategy to retain workers, and the proverb I'd originally included in this speech wasn't quite working for me.

So I dutifully searched the web (how the heck did people write speeches before the Internet?!) and stumbled upon this one:

"The cattle is as good as the pasture in which it grazes."

Which, you know, is sort of a good argument if you're trying to get people to think differently about why the work environment matters, but of course my CEO can't call her audience a bunch of COWS, so I'd never actually include that proverb in her speech. I did, however, think one of my co-workers -- who'd just finished writing a different speech for her -- would find it funny, so I sent him an email titled "punchy speechwriting" and told him I'd briefly considered using it.

He called me about 2 minutes later, and said, impossibly diplomatically, "You know, I like the proverb....but I'm just not sure if it works for this audience, you know?"

And I'm not sure he quite believed me when I told him I was joking. Sometimes I just need to keep my weird sense of humor to myself, I think.