Now, we're all familiar, I hope, with this old chestnut:
Two guys walk into a bar. One of them ducks.At root, it's just a pun on the two meanings of bar. But it's also a joke about jokes, because it wouldn't be funny except for a heaping pile of even older chestnuts in which, you know, two guys walk into a bar. In a strange sort of parallelism, there's also a joke about a duck who walks into a bar. That one's not important, though.
My favorite joke is the one that starts like this:
A baby seal walks into a club...Actually, it ends like that, too. You don't know awkward until you're standing in front of your co-workers at the holiday party, and the head of the company you just joined says, "Well, go on." That's the risk you run when all your jokes play on what the audience expects from a joke. That aside, it's a great joke: I've never seen another that combines brevity, meta-humor, and brutality towards adorable animals in quite the same way.
Now for Noam Chomsky. He's got this sentence about grammar:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.Got that? Well, don't worry; it's meant to be a demonstration of how a sentence can be grammatically sound, but not have any semantic meaning. The parts of speech are correct, but green things can't be colorless, ideas don't have color nor do they sleep, and if they did they couldn't sleep furiously. Granted, if you work hard enough with figurative meanings, you can come up with something (there have been competitions), but let's just say it's meaningless.
And here's where I work my "magic":
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. One of them ducks.I'm telling you, it kills with linguists... Hopefully that was funny, because now I'm going to explain it. As we all know, any joke properly explained ceases to be funny. So this is your last chance. Note that both the "joke" and "non-joke" versions are equally meaningless in an objective sense, but somehow one of them is a joke, and the other isn't. The first version is a bit of nonsense, while the second is two bits of nonsense grafted together, creating a joke, which you might say is just a different kind of nonsense. Of course, the crucial thing is that the audience knows the contexts of both halves of the joke, and the way that those clash creates the humor. You can analyze this joke on as many layers as you want, and I think that's funny too, given that the original statement is from someone looking into the minute details of how language works... I like this joke more than is strictly healthy, I think.
So I'll leave you with one more joke (not mine) that might be about linguistics. It's kind of hard to say:
How do you tell the difference between a duck?
One of its legs are both the same.
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2 comments:
Probably you've seen this (from http://laughlab.co.uk/), but I was reminded of this one that I like a lot, which is also about linguistics and/or philosophy of language:
An Alsatian went to a telegram office, took out a blank form and wrote:
“Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof.”
The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: “There are only nine words here. You could send another ‘Woof’ for the same price.”
“But,” the dog replied, “that would make no sense at all.”
It's the sort of joke that French, Danes, and Belgians like.
In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein says that "most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical," and gives as an example of a typical philosophical problem "the question of whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful." (The duck-difference duck called this to my mind.)
This is great. But I've always maintained that the first joke would make much more sense as "Two men walk into a bar. A third ducks."
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