Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Joking Around

I am terrible at telling jokes. There are about three I can successfully manage to pull off with enough intelligibility to get a laugh.

Where does a king keep his army?
Up his sleevy.

What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness and a Unitarian?
Someone who knocks on your door and doesn't know why.

What's brown and sticky?
A stick.
Clearly, I am most fond of the question-and-answer format. Probably because it doesn't require remembering an elaborate setup.

So I was glad to see this list of 50 favorite intellectual jokes from a recent Reddit thread. They're almost all short, and while some are scientifically over my head, many are very funny (at least to me). A few of of the best that were new to me:
A programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

(by Android47)

A logician’s wife is having a baby. The doctor immediately hands the newborn to the dad.

His wife asks impatiently: “So, is it a boy or a girl?”

The logician replies: “Yes.”

(by jdefaver)

“I’m a linguist, so I like ambiguity more than most people.”

(by selorn)

Your mother is so classless, she could be a Marxist utopia.

(by wilsonism)

An engineer, a chemist, and an economist are marooned on a desert island. They start to brainstorm a way off the island. The engineer says, “we can lash together some branches and make a crude raft and try to make our way back to land somehow.” The chemist says, “with the right materials we could build a really smokey fire and try to signal a plane.” The economist says, “okay let’s assume we have a boat…”

(by Thoust)

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

(by mwalshe89)
There are more where those came from. Tell me if you completely get the Noam Chomsky joke.

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