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]

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."