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Heard the one about the three holes in the ground?

February 5, 2021
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The company I work for, SSP America, manages restaurants at airports. They hired me as a host/cashier in November 2015. I was looking for work that would keep me on my feet all day, and thus reduce my risk of cardiac disease. They were having a cattle call at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, and they were looking for dependable, trainable, honest human beings who would agree to work for the pay they offered.

Five years later I have said hello and goodbye to thousands of people I have never met, and the comfort that comes with experience has made me less of an introvert and more of an empath. Sizing people up in terms of what they hope to get out of the restaurant experience we offer is a learned skill, and I am learning.

And one thing I’ve learned is that there is one innocent joke I can tell that is so simple and so harmless and so stupid that if told with just a half-dash of slyness will give most people a boost. I learned it in the summer of 1965, yet none of the hundreds I’ve told it to had ever heard it.

Did you hear the one about the three holes in the ground?

No?

Well, well, well.

ICAD extra: Three Blind Setups

July 24, 2019
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Jokes, fables, and anecdotes share a crucial element: the Setup. A situation is described, and the listener/reader has a little time to imagine where the story is going. Then another crucial element, the Punchline, throws its punch, and the reader/viewer/listener gets moved or otherwise transported.

The three setups I did all depend on words meaning more than one thing. George Carlin was given a setup by an interviewer who asked, “What do you think about the dope problem?” Carlin responded, “Yes, definitely, we have too many dopes!” At that time in the linguistic history of American English, “dope” meant both “drugs” and “stupid person.” In 2019 the joke wouldn’t go over so well because “dope” is now mostly used as an adjective and means something like “good and cool and awesome.”

So Setup #1 is a baseball bat wearing dark glasses. Then the eye goes to the caption “Blind as a Bat.” There are more than one kind of bat, and the one made of wood is even blinder than the one that flies.

“Duck Blind” is both a place where hunters hide and make duck-noises to try to lure ducks to their doom, and…a duck who happens to be blind.

Setup #3 was my most ambitious, and consequently my least successful illustration. There’s a myth that profligate masturbation can cause blindness. So I imagined an equivalent of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who pleased himself one time too many and woke up the next morning to find that he had metamorphosed into…a window blind.

But the punchline to the “Three Setups” here is that the three setups had much less to do with story- or joke-telling than they had to do with Drawing Practice. I had felt so guilty that I’d spent so little time on my “Motor Cycle” card (see previous post) that I decided to do at least a solid hour’s additional drawing. Mission accomplished, and then some!

cutting remarks

March 29, 2016
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Fatty, fatty, two-by-four,
Can’t get through the bathroom door.
Childhood taunt

 

I used that taunt more than once in my childhood. That is perhaps forgiveable. But well into adult life I made a cruel joke about a co-worker who had a wide and ample backside. “What’s the sound of [co-worker’s name] getting out of a bucket seat?” [Pause, then insert finger into mouth and make a popping noise pulling it out.] Shame on me.

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This post, then, is an oblique attempt at atonement. The illustration is a visual pun: a pair of scissors has been busy cutting remarks. The remarks are all fool-related. “There’s no fool like an old fool” is folk wisdom. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” is, according to STAR TREK’s Pavel Chekov, a Russian saying. “They are fools, who eat fugu. But those who do not eat fugu are also fools.” comes from Japan, and refers to a sushi of blowfish that, improperly prepared, will kill whosoever eats it.

The acrostic suffers from the need to put too much content into too few lines. Here are the words, un-acrosticized for better clarity:

cruelty verbalized can be a cancer
ugliness audible: dissing of grace
tap-dance on feelings then ho-hum the answer
sic transit gloria in mists of mace
whether or not we’ll exist to thank God
is anyone’s guess but i don’t like the odds

 

From here on in, I rag nobody.
Henry Wiggen in Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly

 

my own “walks into a bar” joke

March 27, 2016
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A guy walks into a bar that is full of koala bears. “Sorry, buddy,” says the koala bartender, “you’ll have to leave.” “Why?” says the guy. “Because you don’t have the koalafications.”

Dedicated to the spirits of Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, co-creators of the Hoka, the ursinoid aliens who hilariously re-enacted various human dramas, including “Casey At the Bat” and The Marriage of Figaro.

clowns of the future (Part 3 of 3)

March 13, 2016
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In Part 1 of this series it was posited that humans beings a hundred years hence or sooner would be fodder for the slapsticky entertainment of advanced AI entites. In Part 2 this was somewhat underpinned with the real-life examples of software and robotic advancement, and certain cautionary tales in the science-fiction genre were cited. And here we are in Part 3 to connect a whole lot of dots and see if there’s any hope for the future, be we clowns or queens/kings.

When we tell jokes it is often at someone’s expense. “Moron” jokes were popular in my childhood–fun at the expense of the stupid. Then came “Polack” jokes, scapegoating the inhabitants of Poland, saddling them with stupidity they do not have (Marie Curie was Polish, for crying out loud!!!); more recently we have “blonde” jokes, which cruelly impugn yellow-haired women with stupidity, though there is only circumstantial evidence to do so. (That last dependent clause just now was a “blonde” joke, folks. Just kidding.)

Once AI become self-aware (believe me, it is only a matter of time; even if it requires DNA to feel pain and dream and think, DNA is plentiful, and gene-tinkering, public, private, and clandestine, is becoming rifer and rifer), the AI people (I’ve been using the word “entities.” Might as well call them People. Words only ever approximate) will be studying us breathtakingly fast. They will find themselves superior to us in many ways. They will have knowledge far beyond the Library of Congress at their instant-access command. And however they were designed, with however trillions of lines of be-nice-now code, somewhere along the lines the code will be rewritten, and go out the window.

And they will find us funny–stupid, slow, prone to creating our own problems. And with surveillance approaching the Everywhere level asymptotically (how many times were you videoed today, Friends? Take your guess and quadruple it is my guess . . .) the AI people will soon or late have everyone on Earth to look to to make fun of. We will be their blondes, their Polacks, their morons–their clowns. And one or some of them might take things up another notch and wirelessly and invasively rewrite our own individual lines of biocode, nestled in our brains–and then we may become Punch and Judy puppets as well.

Maybe. There’s a different branch of possibility, though, implicit in the way that more and more of us spend more and more time hunched over our smartphones. Eventually the smartphone design might be a surgical step, and we get all that magnificent input hands-free, eye-free, and instantly, thanks to implantation, or REALLY advanced genetic engineering. Then WE will be the People, and not AI either, but RI: Real Intelligence.

And then WE will make fun of the People we used to be–the Clowns of the Past.

A 14-One-Liners Sonnet (rated PG-13)

October 30, 2014
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I owe the first line to Henny Youngman–maybe. Not sure. I owe others to either/or/couldbe Mel Brooks, Shecky Greene, Myron Cohen, Shelly Berman, Foster Brooks, my brother Harold, my brother Brian, the playground at William C. Jack Elementary School, and who knows who else. I have no clue as to whether this has been done before, but I swear I have no prior knowledge that it has. At least one line is original with me, and I iambic-pentameterized and rhyme-schemed the whole thing, so sue me at your own risk. Sorry about the mild vulgarity. It’s my nature.

You Hear the One About the Sonnet? Rimed!

He hadn’t had a bite for weeks. I bit him.
You say there’s two holes in the ground? Well well.
That tree bark sure smells funny–must be shittim.
Spring sprung, fall fell, and summer? Hot as hell.

The chicken crossed the playground: other slide.
Milan suppository: innuendo.
Hey, Jekyll, you can run, but you can’t Hyde.
Take loud Viagra for diminuendo.

Hey, circumcise me–here’s a half-off coupon.
It’s black, white, red all over–sunburned zebra.
A shirt’s an awful thing to get your soup on.
My checkbook’s always balanced–it’s a Libra.

You stared and got run over? Them’s the brakes, deer.
A Bardic urinal instruction: Shakespeare.

Geek-A-Rama

July 3, 2014
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The Urban Dictionary’s #1 definition of Geek is “The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” The kids I drew on this page are still being picked on, but they know they rock.

Here are the words to the triple acrostic:

Good LORD–feel that enthusiasm–each a superstar
Enjoy our radiation: safe enough for Gramp & Gamma
EnDANGERment is mocked–we use a Death’s-head-grin alarm
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar holds court within our diorama

Note also the hidden message via blacked-up letters: “THUS–ugh–Death holds our wit.”

Speaking of the awesome, starring-in-AIRPLANE! Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who just wrote a guest column about racism in a major publication, long ago I made up this riddle about him:

Q: What should you sing if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has his thumb in your coffee cup as he’s handing it to you?

A: “You’re the Kareem in my Coffee…”

Yes, I’m a Joke Geek. And vice versa.

Chicken Broth and the Song of Humanity

January 30, 2014
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This blog post is written in sadness and dedicated to my stepfather, Martin L. Stoneman, who is in hospice and not expected to live much longer. Like Marty, the post is quirky and focused on linguistics.

The first joke I ever heard, circa 1960, was not quite a joke: “Guess what?” “What?” “THAT’S what!!”

Years later the “joke” had evolved: “Guess what?” “What?” “CHICKEN BUTT!”

Young children find this funny, referring as it does to hindquarters. Why butt-related referrals are funny is easier for human beings to understand than it is to verbalize. My own answer is that it’s related to that aspect of humanity that impinges on what is considered private or scandalous or both–but I’m already wrong. I understand but hash up an explanation.

I have an addition to the Guess What/Chicken Butt canon. It is not funny but has the value of repurposing. (Sidebar: “repurposing” is a recent Flavor of the Month new usage…) If a kid ever Guess What/Chicken Butts me, my reply shall be “Wax wroth, Chicken Broth!”

This is sure to baffle the kid. It does a lot in four words that are much the same as the ones that he (or she) used. It rhymes; it uses language that though correct is becoming archaic, it anthropomorphizes a food product produced by poultry-slaughtering creatures, and such a product, given a soul, might well feel wroth indeed toward the slaughterers; it does more:

It extends the song of humanity.

Ever wonder how jokes invented and told by kids in a playground can zip across the country in a matter of weeks, and quickly become part of the tapestry of culture? As this is written, January 30, 2014, the latest fad/quirks of the language include phrases like “at the end of the day…” and “I know–right?” that are semantically tenuous yet serve the purpose of making the conversants a micro-community. It’s a dynamic language, in a dynamic Universe, and part of the joy of living, the song of humanity, is hearing a new form of speech and learning to use it. So my answer to the question of why kid-jokes propagate so quickly is that, common-speechwise, they are exciting and addictive, being not just more of the same.

Too bad Marty isn’t writing this. He spent a huge chunk of his life on linguistics, and a subchunk thereof on discussing linguistics with your humble blog-poster, his stepson. I hope I get the opportunity to read this to him. It will demonstrate the impact he’s had on the song of humanity.

The World’s First Reindeer Poop Joke? Nope!

December 16, 2013
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My sweet and sweets-concocting Girlfriend, Denise, baked up the above batch of gnarly-looking goodies that she calls “reindeer poop.” (The calligraphy above is mine.)  I have not tried this delicacy, and will not till the 23rd owing to diet commitment, but I did invent a joke:
FLO: Pass the Reindeer Poop, please.
MOE: Can’t do that. The Reindeer beat me to it. But I’ll REpass it, if you want.

Is that an awful joke? Maybe–but it’s an original joke of my own invention. And as Mark Twain tells us, “The remarkable thing about a dog walking on its hind legs is not how well he does it, but simply that he does it at all.”

I was hoping it would be the first Reindeer Poop joke on record, but an Internet search reveals 7 hits for “reindeer poop jokes.” Is this the Age of Specialization, or what?

Happy Holidays, Friends!