Where do Polish jokes come from? I've always heard as a rule of thumb that jokes of that kind are told about the place to the west of where you come from yourself. The British tell Irish jokes; the Irish tell Kerryman jokes; the Kerrymen tell jokes about Dingle. (It does seem a little overneat, admittedly.) By that rule, Polish jokes ought to originate from Belarus or Ukraine, or perhaps the Soviet Union, since they mostly date from that era.
I wonder what makes an intellectual joke? Is it simply that it has to rely on a modicum of familiarity with a field predesignated as intellectual, or should it actually require some intellectual effort in itself? If you are geeky enough to know what the Bechdel test is (it's not exactly a complicated concept - that's partly its point) the Bechdel joke is very straightforward. The Oct 31 = Dec 25 joke, by contrast, at requires you to do some maths in different bases.
Fwiw, a friend of mine gave me Hofstadter's You are a Strange Loop only a couple of years ago. But then she knew how much I had loved G, E, B in the early '80s.
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Date: 2013-06-29 07:29 pm (UTC)I wonder what makes an intellectual joke? Is it simply that it has to rely on a modicum of familiarity with a field predesignated as intellectual, or should it actually require some intellectual effort in itself? If you are geeky enough to know what the Bechdel test is (it's not exactly a complicated concept - that's partly its point) the Bechdel joke is very straightforward. The Oct 31 = Dec 25 joke, by contrast, at requires you to do some maths in different bases.
Fwiw, a friend of mine gave me Hofstadter's You are a Strange Loop only a couple of years ago. But then she knew how much I had loved G, E, B in the early '80s.