The joke, which was new to me and entertained me enormously:
(#1)
Archive for the ‘Jokes’ Category
The library hookers and booze joke
September 25, 2020
The soup fly
September 1, 2020
Flies met cute
August 9, 2020The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 8/7 features a housefly couple telling the story of how they met:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Where to begin? Well, it’s a decidedly meta cartoon, in which the characters know they are cartoon characters and comment on that fact. And it’s a cartoon in which parallel worlds are aligned and translated from one to the other: a world of conventional American domesticity (in which couples meet and form relationships, and entertain friends in their home); and a world of fly jokes, turning on the appearance of houseflies in soup at restaurants.
All this held together by a story type in film-making: the meet cute form, in which unlikely accidents of meeting lead to romantic involvements.
If a man does it, …
June 11, 2020(A number of jokes, but also some seriously technical linguistics.)
A joke going the rounds on the net recently, here from a exchange posted on Facebook on 3/24 (yes, yes, I am incredibly far behind on my postings; life has been very difficult):
(#1) Anaphoric do it : ‘(a man) sleeps with 10 men’ (the gay reading) vs. ‘(a man) sleeps with 10 women’ (the Don Juan reading)
In a similar vein, this Stone Soup cartoon of 6/17/11:
(#2) Anaphoric do the same, with at least three readings (discussed below), one of them gay
The phenomenon at play here is called sloppy (vs. strict) identity. The gay readings above involve strict identity.
A priest, a rabbit, and a minister
February 26, 2020… walk into a bar. And into a Walk Into Bar joke, which then goes doubly meta. The rabbit brings a really big beer to the event. The joke has been around in print, in one form or another, for maybe 20 years. The image is a fantasist painting “Bunny with Beer” (from 2017) by the artist Omar Rayyan. The two joined in happy union by an unknown hand, during the past few days, in the form of a texty cartoon:
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Revisiting 31: That’s Good / That’s Bad
August 26, 2019My 7/22 posting “Oh that’s good” looked at Archie Campbell’s That’s Good / That’s Bad joke routine from the tv show Hee Haw. Now Tim Evanson points out a somewhat later appearance of the routine, in an episode of The Simpsons.
(#1) From “Treehouse of Horror III”, The Simpsons S4 E5 (first aired 10/29/92)
Exception-triggered alternation
August 25, 2019Exhibit A: the joke routine That’s Good / That’s Bad from an Archie Campbell comedy sketch — discussed in my 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good”.
Exhibit B: the principles that predict when a N + N compound in English has primary accent on the first (modifier) N (front stress, or forestress) and when that accent falls on the second (head) N (back stress, or afterstress) — discussed in my old paper “Forestress and afterstress”, (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986, viewable on-line here).
From a sufficiently abstract point of view, these two phenomena can be seen to be manifestations of a single scheme, which I’ll refer to as exception-triggered alternation.
The opossum joke
July 30, 2019(I posted a version of this under the heading “The opossum” on July 30th, but by a WordPress glitch the link to that posting was later re-directed to the next posting in line, “Ralph at the Port Authority” (here), so that my earlier posting disappeared completely. I lamented this loss on Facebook, and eventually archivist and quote investigator Garson O’Toole magicked up a Google Cache version of the text for me. Thanks to Garson, here’s a reconstituted version.)
(Totally baffled addendum. WordPress has published this revised posting with the date 7/30, though it was actually posted on 8/1.)
A very sweet One Big Happy from 6/30: Ruthie and her grandfather:
(#1)
A granddad joke — well, actually, two of them in sequence, the first sledgehammer simple (a classic dad joke), the second delightfully subtle (a meta-joke in which the audience response becomes a crucial part of the joke).
Oh that’s good
July 22, 2019Following on my 7/7 posting “GN/BN”, about the Good News Bad News joke routine, which the hounds of ADS-L traced back to the early 19th century (at least). Other commenters offered formuations of the idea that there’s a good side and a bad side to everything, the bad comes withthe good, and lots of other things that, however interesting, are not instances of the joke formula (in any of its variants). But then on 7/16, Bill Mullins posted about an entirely different joke formula hinging on the opposition of good and bad.
Bill wrote:
Are you familiar with Archie Campbell’s “That’s Good/That’s Bad” routines? He used to do them on Hee Haw.
And we’re off!
Penguins at the sushi bar
July 21, 2019From Michael Thomas on Facebook yesterday, a link to a CNN travel story, “Pair of penguins waddles into New Zealand sushi spot” by Isabela Espadas Barros Leal on 7/19/19. Mike, knowing of my (separate) interests in sushi and in penguins, asked, “Does your local sushi joint have any of these?”
To which I replied, “Sadly, no. But pair of penguins waddles into New Zealand sushi spot sounds like the beginning of an exotic Walk Into Bar joke.”
Let’s take this one bit at a time, starting with the news story.
