intellectual jokes

[calimac]

Here's a good thread that was sent me from Reddit: What's the most intellectual joke you know?

I haven't read all of these, not by a long shot, because the thread is a very long shot indeed, but my favorite of the ones I read was:

Two women walk into a bar, and talk about the Bechdel test.

Delving into my own meager mental file of jokes (I like jokes, but I can rarely remember them) produces two that I heard at SF conventions in the early 1980s that stuck with me. If they're on the Reddit thread, they're way down there somewhere. One is merely a portrait, a sad tale:

The computer programmer was found dead in the shower, in his hand an empty bottle of shampoo. The label read: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat."

The other is a simple riddle.

Q. Why did Douglas R. Hofstadter cross the road?
A. To make this joke possible.

There's also my small and select collection of Polish jokes that aren't insulting to the intelligence of Poles, but I'll leave those for now.

My question for you now about the above 30-year-old jokes, especially if you're no more than a decade or so older than the jokes are, is: are they obsolete? Do endless loops still exist in computer programming language, and, if so, do today's programmers know about them? And does anybody still remember Douglas R. Hofstadter? Once upon a time, his name and work came up constantly in conversations around me, but now he's almost as vanished from the common discourse I hear as is the then equally ubiquitous Julian Jaynes.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Of course I remember Hofstadter. During our move chorale and I discussed whether to keep Le ton beau de Marot on our shelves, and that inspired me to learn "Villon's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves" by heart, and get out the OED to look up as much of the Victorian thieves' cant as possible. And a week ago at dinner my host was asking me what I thought of Hofstadter's idea that the self is a strange loop.

I'm fond of the three-people-do-X genre. My friend caprine tells an especially recondite (and self-referential!) one (<lj user="caprine" also frequently cites the Bechdel test, by the way): Noam Chomsky, Kurt Gödel, and Werner Heisenberg walk into a joke together. Heisenberg says, "I can't tell if this joke is funny or not." Gödel says, "Of course you can't; you're inside the joke." Chomsky says, "Of course it's funny. You're just not telling it right!" But I also like A mathematician, a physicist, and a biologist are sitting on a park bench with a view of a house. As they talk, two people enter the house. Fifteen minutes later, three people leave. The physicist says, "It seems that people are not conserved!" The biologist says, "Obviously they've reproduced." The mathematician says, "Now, if one person goes into that house, it will be empty." I think the best intellectual joke I've made up Synecdoche is a figure of speech that stands for the state of New York.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Good one there, that last!

You left out a closing angle-bracket, so it says
(<lj user="caprine" also frequently cites…

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Here's something from Buzzfeed that was circulating Facebook just yesterday:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/jokes-only-nerds-will-understand

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I think that's a selection from the Reddit thread. There's only a few of them (4, 12, 14) that I needed an explanation for.

17, which is a variant on one of mine, irritates me because it's sloppy. If the programmer is that literal, he won't know what to do with the first loaf of bread after he picks it up.

20 was invented by Isaac Asimov in one of his F&SF columns.

10 is usually told specifically about the Dalai Lama rather than a generic Buddhist monk. I once saw a horrifying video in which a reporter, interviewing the Dalai Lama, actually tried to tell him this joke. The Dalai Lama didn't get it.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, the jokes have Reddit headers. I hadn't noticed.

There's a reply joke to #10.

The hot dog vendor makes the hot dog and serves it to the monk. The monk hands the vendor a $20, who puts it in his cash box. After a bit, the monk asks, "Where's my change?" and the vendor replies, "Change comes from within."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, change comes from within. It comes from within the cash box. Please give me my change.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Your programmer joke made me laugh!

4. Mu is the coefficient of friction
12. I think the third logician is able to give a definite answer for all 3 because the first two gave indefinite answers? Hazy on this one myself.
14. A pascal is a unit of pressure defined by one newton per square meter, where a newton is a unit of force.

It took me a surprisingly long time to work out Oct 31 = Dec 25.

I disagree about #17. It's not about an infinite loop, it's about an indefinite referent, "Pick up a dozen [of ?]" More a logic/linguistics joke than a programmer joke.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What makes 17 a variant is the taking the instructions literally, and that's less a function of logic than it is of having to spell out everything explicitly if you're programming, at least in BASIC, which is the only computer language I know anything about. The problem with it is that "pick up a loaf of bread" doesn't explicitly include "and then buy it and bring it home." He should be still standing there in the store holding the loaf, because he hasn't been told what else to do with it.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

If 10 is the one whose punch line is "Make me one with everything," I have never seen or heard it told about the Dalai Lama. I think I've most often heard the setup as "What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?"

The recent book on humor co-authored by Daniel Dennett uses this joke to show the cognitive structure of a badly told joke:

A man says to a hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything"—oh, and the man's a Buddhist!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The classic humor book How To Be a Jewish Mother by Dan Greenberg includes a section on how to tell a joke, which might as well be how not to tell a joke. It begins with the philosophy that the punchline is the best part, so start with that.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

"Enjoy."

Miscellaneous comment

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

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.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if "insulting to the intelligence of X" jokes generalize to what I'm about to say, but I've noticed that geographically-related social prestige in Europe is not purely compass-direction oriented, but radiates out from a center somewhere between the Low Countries and Switzerland, and is relative to your location. Thus, in the British isles prestige decreases to the north and the west, in France and Spain to the west and south, in Italy to the south, and in Germany to the east.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I've heard a few of these (and seen variants of the thread). Most are pretty good.

One of my favorite things about writing plays to be performed at science fiction conventions is that people will get my jokes. Here's one of my favorites:

"Let a smile be your umbrella, but let a simile be like a bumbershoot." ("When the Chips Are Down", 1983, I think.)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Hofstadter, SURE!

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

In the SF techie geek circles of my youth, Hofstadter was ubiquitous. Julian Jaynes, not so much. (I bought a copy of Jaynes from browsing in a near-university bookstore back then. Never did read it, though.)