A joke

July 2, 2014 • 6:49 am

While writing about the possibly apocryphal story of Napoleon and Laplace (“I have no need of that hypothesis”), a joke suddenly came to me. It is only the fourth joke I’ve invented in my life.*

Q:  Why was the Empress Josephine like Americans at Thanksgiving dinner?
A: Because they all took a bone apart.

I presume that many countries have the tradition of breaking the wishbone.

I’ll be here all week, folks.

______

*Here’s another, which has to be related verbally and pronounced properly:

Q: What do French horses eat?
A: Haute cuisine.

106 thoughts on “A joke”

  3. Q: What did one Canadian geneticist say to the other? A: We all have our bears to cross.

      1. This IS my own joke, as all of my poor students (who’ve heard it a thousand times) will tell you.

        Speaking of a thousand times, I’ve told you a thousand times not to use hyperbole!

      1. It’s only pronounced like that by Americans trying to speak french though 🙂

  10. Like it Jerry!

    I made up a joke when I was a kid:

    Q: What do you call a race between two corpses?

    A: Stiff Competition.

      2. Cliff,

        Interesting. People have always answered “a dead heat” to that riddle.

        Which is why I prefer “stiff competition” because I’ve yet to see someone guess that answer.

  11. OK – this is a true story. I am not sure how understandable to non-British readers…

    It was when I still worked at St. Paul’s Cathedral, & I went on a ‘date’, & the next day some wag asked me “Did you get to first base?”
    “No”
    “Did you get to second base?”
    “No. I got to home base – when I got home I had to do it myself!”

    2. If you worked at St Paul’s, why were you speaking American?

      Or was that in Minnesota?

      (I know the Brits invented baseball, but didn’t realise that ‘date’ and the ‘base’ terminology were part of the Mother Tongue. They’re well known but obviously USian idioms to Aussie ears. Am I not right?)

      1. The UK is of course well up-to-date (!) with popular US culture on the whole, & St.Paul’s Cathedral has an American Chapel to boot!

        And stop saying ‘Brits’!

  12. Last week I twe*ted one that came to me…
    The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a very Pricip-led act!

    1. Try again –
      The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a very Princip-led act!

  15. Re: the first joke. I thought Bonaparte is what he and Josephine did when he was away fighting the wars…

  16. I’m empty of jokes as I love to hear them but suck at telling them. I do better at generally punning about deeming from reactions.

    But if need be, I can attempt to recast a limerick of my own from my PhD days.

    You are duly warned:

    Q: Why did the experimental physicist lose his electron?

    A: His pocket had a hole.

      1. Well, for what its worth I’m no longer negative!

        Or as the salty character of a movie chemist once said:

        “I’m Bond. Ionic Bond.”

  17. Q: How many Pakistani umpires does it take to change a light bulb?

    A: None, he refuses to change it until it gives him a written apology for going out.

    This was pretty funny in 1988, doesn’t work so well now.

  18. Keep your day job, Jerry!

    No, actually it wasn’t that bad of a joke 🙂

  19. Not original:

    Two atoms were walking along, when the first said, “Wait. I’ve lost an electron.”
    “Are you sure?” said the second.
    “Yes. I’m positive.”

      1. I sure hope nobody repeats that joke. I don’t think I could stand a redox.
        😉

        1. Well, I guess if you’re not in charge you won’t see the attraction.

          *ok, i’ll stop now…

  21. This was written by me about a real friend of mine whose real last name is Duda, and is fairly truthful

    A secular humanist named Duda
    sort of liked followers of Buddha
    He said “This beats the pagans
    Since they will read Carl Sagan
    and they don’t dance around in the nuda.”

    and another by me about a real friend named Dible but a bit less truthful

    A secular humanist named Dible
    had unorthodox views on the Bible
    When a sweet Baptist belle
    tried to warn him of hell
    He seduced her with a bottle of Weibel.

    and a ruder one (authored by me) that Christopher Hitchens would like since he always admired limericks with internal rhymes (word in middle of line matches word at end of same line- I’ve got three here)

    There was a mountain climber named Zeke
    Who took a leak from the top of Pike’s Peak
    His schlong was so strong
    The stream arced to Hong Kong
    After orbiting for over a week.

  22. Prof. C, did you coyne those jokes?

    Hobby Lobby has a new name. It’s now called Wahabi Lobby.

    1. Via Wikipedia: “I have it on the authority of M. Arago that Laplace, warned shortly before his death that that anecdote was about to be published in a biographical collection, had requested him [Arago] to demand its deletion by the publisher. It was necessary to either explain or delete it, and the second way was the easiest. But, unfortunately, it was neither deleted nor explained.”

      On my reading of this, Laplace DID say it, the hypothesis was the Newtonian one you refer to, but he wanted to disown it rather than attept the futile task of dispelling the misunderstanding.

      Hawking and Lowentin both refer to this, with the interpretation you state, which I feel sure is correct. They then (both) leap from Laplace’s practical methodological naturalism (good) to an unwarranted intrinsic or presuppositional methodological naturalism (bad); as I’m sure Jerry knows, Maarten Boudry has written eloquently on all this.

    2. I needed Google Translate with text-to-speech to get this, but, LOL!

      1. Rasputin could do it. Ha! I raise your esotericism to a higher level!

    4. There’s a whole book of Mother Goose rhymes (in English) rewritten in nonsensical phonetic French.

      See Wikipedia: Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames

      The couple of French speakers to whom I’ve given a copy of “Un petit d’un petit” (Humpty Dumpty) were mystified then delighted when it was explained to them.

        1. A couple of other commenters have given non-original jokes but, point taken, here are two math jokes original to me:

          Question: Why are mathematicians so secure?
          Answer: There’s safety in numbers!

          Question: What was the astrological sign of the topologist?
          Answer: Taurus.

  25. From real life:
    An American sees the Danish motorway signs against speeding.
    A: “Crazy, those Danes even have fart control!

    And then there’s the anglophone who tries to read the warning de gule prikker må ikke overskrides at the railway platform, and asks his Danish companion what it means. Upon which his friend a bit too quickly translates: “You may not cross the yellow pricks.”

    1. Claimed to be a true story:

      A local professor, which name I’ll omit for privacy reasons but is spelled _öö_, once wrote the spelling during a conference held in english.

      – “I’m _öö_, with 4 pricks!”

  26. It’s not a joke, but Jerry might appreciate this satire of the recent Supreme Court Hobby Lobby ruling, from the Atlanta Banana but via Hemant’s “Friendly Atheist” page (sorry no link, for some reason my computer won’t bring up the original site):

    The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Roman-owned pizza chain Little Caesar’s was within its rights to place Christian employees in an arena and then unleash starved, vicious lions and lionesses upon them. The court cited religious freedom as its guiding principle. The 5-to-4 ruling opened the door to potentially thousands of Christian Little Caesar employees nationwide being immediately fed to the top predators of the African savannah.

    Little Caesar’s argued that the persecution of Christians and the feeding of them to ravenous big cats was a “deeply held” religious belief, that the continued survival of the roughly 6,000 Christian employees, as well as the fact that they remained on company payroll, imposed a “substantial financial burden” on their religious liberty.

    1. Since the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10 King James Version), shouldn’t Christian employees work for free?

      1. I rust proofing place I used to take my cars to was owned by born again Christians. They gave out a notification that they would no longer work with dealerships because they were Christian. I assumed this was because the dealerships ripped people off. Soon, they ended up closing up shop. They were nice though and now I have to drive far far away to get my rust proofing done.

  27. Here’s a Bayesian joke.

    I’m a bit of a nervous flyer and I have been told that the probability of a bomb being on my plane is one in a million but the probability of there being two bombs on my plane is one in a million million then to be extra safe should I take a bomb with me?

    1. Well, since this equation includes the term (x-x), the answer would be zero, but I don’t get how this is a joke.

      1. Not a joke, just fun. Most people struggle with for a while – you’ve saved them all a lot of time by giving the answer so quickly.

        1. Oh, sorry.
          Let me offer another math puzzle then.

          Imagine a rope running along the equator, all around the Earth. The rope is just long enough so the two end just touch. Now, you want to make the rope into a kind of fence by putting a bunch of 1 meter tall posts all along the equator and laying the rope on top of the posts. How much longer would the rope have to be?

          1. But now they all get to give this to their non-WEIT reading friends and feel superior, so life is good. I have to thank my HS Algebra II teacher for this. I’m sure I learned other things, but this is what I remember.

          2. OK …

            The circumference of the earth is 2piR

            C=2piR

            Increase the radius by one meter will increase the circum by x meters

            So

            2piR+x=2pi(R+1)

            or

            2piR+x=2piR+2pi
            or
            x=2pi meters ….

          3. Update: what is surprising and counter-intuitive is that it doesn’t matter what the radius of the object is. Raise the string by 1m on the moon, sun (I would suggest doing that one at night though)or earth gives the same result…. 6.28 meters ….

          5. Not to be overly pedantic, but by putting up posts you turn the circle into a polygon. Which is exactly what happens when your parrot flies away….

  30. There seems to be a confusion here, and in the skeptical community at large, between a pun and a joke. The difference is that a joke is funny.

          1. It’s a wee bitty ant.

            No replacement for the real thing, though. 🙂

    2. Or, as it has been said:

      A. (After telling a corny joke) “I always say, there is nothing like a good joke.”

      B. “And that was nothing like a good joke.”

      Please tell me we can all name the movie!

      1. Don’t know about that movie, but how about something inspired by ‘Annie Hall’:

        The jokes on this thread aren’t very good, and there’s too few of them.
        😉

  32. Three Bayesians walk into a bar. (1) What is the probability that this is a joke? (2) What is the probability that one of the Bayesians is a rabbi? (3) Given that there is a rabbi, what is the probability that this is a joke?

    1. Three statisticians walk into a bar. The bartender asks “Do all three of you want a beer?”. The first statistician says “I don’t know”, the second says “I don’t know”, and the third says “Yes”. Not my own joke.

      1. A Bayesian would have arrived at the correct answer faster, given that they’d just walked into a bar.

        1. Ack, I screwed this joke up. It’s supposed to be logicians, not statisticians.

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