CLASSIC VERSION:

 
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
 
MODERN VERSION:

 
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. "America" is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association for the Advancement of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias", and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green." Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's".

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration infront of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing "We Shall Overcome". Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share".

Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act", retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursdays between 1:30 and 3:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.

The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

8)

The moral of this story is:

Always have a good lawyer.

Now you see if the ant had a good lawyer, he could have won the case and countersued the grasshopper for malicious prosecution.

REading this doesn't make me laugh... it makes me sad 

umm... not entirely...
No doubt it is funny, but it is not all true. I think we all know this is aimed toward the difference in lifestyles between blacks and whites, and their attempts to gain social and economical equality. Though it has some parallels, the joke in its entirety is far from true...  for one the green bug did nothing while the ant worked his butt off, though some might think this is true, in reality, the green bug worked HIS a$$ of and the ant took all his money.

All in all, it is not wrong to laugh and get amusement from the joke, but to believe that cynical view toward the advancement of the lifestyles of minorities is ignorant.