Jokes

This page collects jokes I made up and other frivolities.

Jokes

From 2020 Aug: What do you call it when the lead actress from Xena: Warrior Princess is about to perform a scene? Answer: imminent Lawless action.

From 2018 Nov 8: A newspaper that's written with ink and paper could be called a "paper paper", as distinguished from an "online paper". If you pay for each copy of the newspaper purchased, you pay per paper paper. (When spoken aloud, that sounds like "paper paper paper".)

From 9 Sep. 2016: "Memetic children" are people whom your ideas influence. Of course, these people can go on to influence you as well, making you their memetic child. As a result, you can be your own memetic grandpa (or grandma).

From 2013 Feb 10:

Ruairi: "I don't know nuthin' about crabs!:O"

Brian: "Oh, don't be crabby, Ruairi. You have lobs-ter talk about. Don't clam up your knowledge and cl-oyster your ideas. That would be shellfish of you. You're usually not prawn to shyness."

From 2013: Sometimes when I was eating cucumbers fresh out of the fridge, they would make me cold. (This is true.) One might say that while eating them, I became "as cool as a cucumber".

From 2012: What do you call someone who can’t wait to leave the hospital after an operation? An impatient inpatient.

From 2012: Sometimes when I try to take a nap, I fail to fall asleep. We might call this a NAP Error.

From 10 Oct. 2011: Bacteria were looking for a new home. They came across maize kernels that had been spilled on the floor. One said to the others: "Let’s all live in hominy together."

From circa 2001: What's the word that refers to the process of taking off one's winter jacket? Answer: anticodon ("anti coat on")

Lyrics

While playing Super Mario Bros. 3 in the 1990s, I could hear in the back of my head lyrics to one of the songs from World 1 of the game. These lyrics are simple, but they're what I felt like the music was saying:

That's the beauty, of our system.
That's the beauty of ours.
That's the beauty, of our system.
That's the beauty of our system, today.
That's the beauty of
That's the beauty of
That's the beauty of
That's the beauty of
That's the beauty of
That's the beauty of
That's the beauty of our system, today!

Games

Peach cake is weird monkeys

When I was about ~8 years old, I often visited the house of some friends. One of the many games we played was something we apparently invented (though probably it has been invented many times). The idea was to take a chain of N people and generate an N-word sentence. The first person invents a word. S/he whispers it to the second person, who then picks a word that could naturally follow the first word in a sentence. For instance, if the first word is "Peach", the second could be "cake" to make the phrase "Peach cake". The second person whispers only his/her word to the third person, who picks a word that could follow only the second word, without knowing the first. For instance, if the second word is "cake", the third word could be "is" to make "cake is". And so on. On our first round of the game, we produced the sentence "Peach cake is weird* monkeys", and that's what we named the game thenceforth. (*Actually, the word wasn't "weird" but something else that's not very politically correct.)

This game can be seen as generative sentence production from a bigram language model in which each successive word is picked to have a high value of P(next_word | previous_word).

Emoji abbreviations

In chats with close friends, I like to use emojis in place of certain words or phrases for humorous effect. The below table lists many of these abbreviations. An example statement using some of these abbreviations would be the following:

🐖 for 🐢. I'm 🚴 to reply now, but I 🐸 your day goes 🕳. 🐑 🛏 📻