Archive for the ‘Jokes’ Category
February 25, 2026
This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:
The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez
on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.
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Posted in Academic life, AI, Double entendres, Jokes, Language processing, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Stanford | 2 Comments »
December 22, 2025
Today’s Zits comic strip sets up a baffling list of ridiculous and raunchy-sounding things Jeremy’s father wants for Christmas — a Wiggly Pickle! Kinky Beavers! — and resolves the puzzle in the final panel.
(#1) Fishing lures, kids, fishing lures; apparently all from the Reaction Innovations fishing lure supply company, and so known to a substantial number of fishing enthusiasts
I suspected what was going on when spinners and crickets turned up in the second panel. But it’s still a sweet set-up.
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Posted in Jokes, Language and animals, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2025
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
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Posted in Humor, Jokes, Language and animals, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »
December 5, 2025
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is an advanced exercise in cartoon understanding: a wordless strip (no speech, no caption) in which a tuxedoed performer takes a bow, next to a toy piano:
Ah, he seems to be a pianist, and the tiny piano, no more than a foot long, must be his instrument; at that point, you are baffled — unless you’re familiar with a classic walk-into-bar joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there’s only 1 in this strip — see this Page)
In this variant of the classic joke, that piano is in fact 12 inches long, a 12-inch piano, so the performer is a 12-inch pianist. This is the status conferred on him by a genie when he wished for a 12-inch penis. Whoops.
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Posted in Jokes, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Understanding comics | 10 Comments »
November 10, 2025
In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Language and religion, Language play, Lexical semantics, Philosophy, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
November 7, 2025
Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:
— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]
— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]
[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]
— GN: You crack me up, dude!
— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.
Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins
I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Errors, Jokes, Language play, Nonsense | 2 Comments »
October 28, 2025
From Ed Battistella on Facebook on 10/25, this remarkable Halloween display in a corner lot in Ashland OR not far from EB’s house:
(#1) A solid-dark figure of dread — not jolly fun, not even edgy fun — and mortal decay (remnants of its clothes are falling away from the black skeleton), with none of the conventional features of skeletal Halloween memento mori (no white skull or face, but charcoal black; no stylized scythe, but a peasant’s scythe in black, with a rough wooden handle and a crudely hand-tempered blade), posing unsteadily amongst the detritus of material destruction, even the skull of a baby
The dark lord of death, the Grim Reaper, in autumnal haze, mid-day, on an ordinary suburban street, stalking the home of Southern Oregon University (where EB hangs out), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and strikingly liberal politics.
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Posted in Costumes, Holidays, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
October 9, 2025
The 10/7 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), multifariously playful, cleverly goofy. Something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times.
(#1) It’s all about the original Star Trek tv series (if you have somehow missed learning about the show, the cartoon will be incomprehensible to you); the top-level joke is in the title: the flannel frontier, a silly pun on the final frontier — but there’s a lot more (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
October 3, 2025
More from the annals of commercial names, thanks to this Facebook report from Steven Levine, on the road in Asbury Park NJ:
On the way to Ocean Grove NJ for a weekend with some friends, our culinary tour of the Jersey Shore, I passed this sign:
(#1) The Meat & More Corporation of Asbury Park: a butcher shop, noted here for its double entendre name
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Posted in Double entendres, Jokes, Language and food, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
