Joke thread

Hopefully not the one where the Ammit eats my heart and I end up crawling around in the dark eating dust forever.

I want the one with the booze and heavy metal.

edited 5th Aug '12 4:49:48 PM by InverurieJones

Where Ronnie James Dio is?

Yeah. It'll be good to see him again.

An onion named Mike had just returned from the Korean War, and though the war hadn't gone as well as everyone had hoped, there was a welcoming party.

At that party, he danced with a cute young nurse named Jenny (who was also an onion,) and it was pure magic. Mike couldn't really dance, and Jenny was a bit shy, but the messages that passed between their eyes were more than mere dance alone could ever convey.

As these things tend to go - well, at least in Hollywood - they fell in love and, after a couple of months of dating, they got married. Jenny's parents didn't like Mike when Jenny introduced him to them, but it didn't take very long for them to learn to like and respect each other. Mike impressed Jenny's father, who was a WWI veteran, with his stories about Korea.

Less than a year after they got married, Jenny and Mike had a son. His name was Mike Jr. By then, they had taken out a loan and bought a house, a car (not a new model but more than adequate for their needs,) and Mike had found a job at a company that made parts for aeroplanes.

As a baby, Junior wasn't very hard to take care of. But when he grew older, he was what back then would be called "spastic." He'd run around the house (and outside) for hours on end, making a lot of noise and falling down and hurting himself all the time.

His father and his friends thought he'd become an athlete, but if you looked in Mike Sr.'s eyes when he said that, it might seem as if he was telling that to himself so that he wouldn't worry so much about the boy's future.

Junior's mother was always worried about him, but she couldn't always keep an eye on him, what with the housework and everything.

Well, by now you can tell that it was bound to happen: Mike Jr. was run over by a speeding car when he was, as he would often do, despite repeated warnings, running all over the road without paying any attention to his surroundings.

There was a long period of uncertainty about his survival, and his parents made sure that at least one of them was by his bed at all times.

Then, one day, the doctor came, and with a determined look on his face, he told Mike Jr.'s parents that he had some news.

Jenny started crying, but Mike Sr. held strong and said: "Well, doctor, how's it gonna be? Will he recover?"

And the doctor said: "He'll survive, but he's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life."

edited 5th Aug '12 7:12:42 PM by BestOf

@Best Of: Ha ha.

How about this one about elephants and a tree.

A baby elephant in Ethiopia sees a medium-sized tree. He wants to test his strength, but he's not sure if he should, so he asks his dad if he can try to take the tree down by ramming into it. Daddy agrees, thinking that a small pain will teach a big lesson.

The baby elephant touches the tree with his head, takes a couple of steps back, runs as fast as he can and rams right into the tree. As you might expect, the tree doesn't budge.

At this point daddy decides to show off, so he tells the boy to step aside. He figures it'd take him about a dozen steps to reach his maximum speed, so that's how far he places himself of the tree before running at it and ramming right into it. If you had been watching the tree from the other side, and you didn't know an elephant was coming, you would never know that anything had happened to the tree.

Why did the tree have to go and make daddy elephant angry? Now it's time for revenge. Daddy sends a message to the strongest elephant in East Africa. There's a river about a hundred metres from the tree, and as soon as the big elephant has crossed it and seen the tree, he starts running, his refined muscles moving like a machine to focus the whole weight and power of the elephant on its target. Eventually, he hits the tree. And the tree has the audacity not to budge.

Now all the elephants in East Africa fear that they're damaging the reputation of their species. So they contact the largest elephants of South and North Africa. Both of them have been bored recently, what with having no trees big enough to ram into, so they accept the invitation. They meet in Central Africa and run all the way from there, getting faster and faster with every step, until the fastest elephant in North Africa finds himself a couple of steps behind his partner, just when they're about to hit the tree. So he finds the final reserves of strength in him and jumps over the Southern elephant, so that they hit the tree at two different points at exactly the same time.

A single leaf falls off the tree.

This is just too much. How is this even possible? There's no choice now but to send for the strongest elephant in India, just in case he's even stronger than the champions of North and South Africa together. As it turns out, he is.

The fastest elephant of India arrives at the Atlantic shore of Africa, and after he's been carefully aimed directly at the tree, he starts running. His going is slow at first, but by now everyone should know that strong elephants need to cover a lot of ground before they reach their optimal speed.

It turns out that the length of the runway was just right: one step less, and he wouldn't have reached his maximum speed; one more, and he would've been slowing down. He rams the tree, causing an earthquake. Someone swears they saw two leaves falling from the tree, but no one is sure of even that.

The elephants gather to gnash their teeth at their failure, when the elders speak for the first time in a decade. They tell tales of a long-forgotten elephant in the West. This mythical elephant is hibernating, waiting for a tree strong enough to challenge him.

It takes some searching, but finally the elephants find the Old Master. The largest elephant of East Africa has to ram into the Old One just to wake him up. When he does, he says he knows why he's been awoken, and demands to know where the tree is. When he is confident he knows where to go, he starts running - but in the wrong direction. A couple of elephants catch up to him and ask why he's going in that direction, and he tells them that he intends to run around the whole continent of Africa at least once before he hits the tree.

When he's gone halfway around the whole continent, he sees the tree. He decides that it'll take a full lap more to reach the speed he wants to go. He also knows that whatever happens, he can't stop, because he's too old to try this twice. He'll probably die when he hits the tree. So around Africa he goes, until finally the tree is there, and he rams into it. The seismic event he caused is duly preserved in the records, as you will find by asking any university or other institute that has seismic records from that period.

The tree, though, only sheds a couple of leaves, which fall on the corpse of the Old Master. We didn't know him from long, but hopefully we learned something.

The strongest elephant of India feels that he's had enough. He's taking a vacation, and he says he'll probably never return to the wretched continent of Africa. He goes North. After moths, he finds something he simply can't belive: an entire mountain of ice, and in it, something that looks like an elephant.

For days he works, ramming into the ice in the hope of setting free the living force of nature that resides within. Without sleep he toils, until finally the ice, which had shown only minor cracks until then, is torn into shards.

The huge animal within thanks his rescuer and promises to do anything in return. You might know what the Indian guru wants.

So the elephants gather once more, and the ancient beast, too strong and huge for our small Earth, says that he won't need to run around the whole continent. In his day, elephants (well, mammoths) only needed 100 kilometres to reach top speed. This length is duly measured, and off the mammoth goes in search of glory. He rams into the tree, and so hard is the impact that at this point in history an entire civilisation mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth - and it wasn't even in Africa! The tree, though, sheds a couple of leaves, and the mammoth says that he tried his best, and that he'll have to go back North now, to see if others of his kin are in an icy prison there.

The next day, a strange sound is heard from the tree, and it sheds an entire branch.

The little elephant, not so little now that so many years have passed, asks his father if anyone would be likely to mind if he were to ram once more into the tree. His father can't imagine why anyone would mind. So the young elephant goes to the river that was once so nobly crossed by the strongest elephant of East Africa. From there he runs as fast as he can, and rams into the tree.

The tree doesn't budge.

A Chinese man, a Japanese man, a Korean man and an Indian man go to a bar, but the bouncer stops them at the door and says, "I'm sorry, but I can't let you in without a tie."

edited 5th Aug '12 8:25:05 PM by Haldo

Borderline-racist South Korean joke I read once.

A North Korean, a South Korean and a Japanese guy walk into a restaurant. The waiter says, "Excuse me, gentlemen, I'm sorry, but we've run out of meat."

The Japanese guy asks, "What does 'run out' mean?" O.o

The North Korean asks, "What's meat?" O.o

The South Korean asks, "What's 'excuse me'?" O.o

A Soviet and an American died at the same time, and thus they arrived together at the gates of Hell.

Satan explains: "We have two Hells; an American Hell, and a Soviet Hell. You get to pick which one you go to."

Both decide to go to the Hell representing their nation.

A couple of weeks later, they see each other and after brief greetings start telling each other what their Hell is like.

The American goes first: "In our Hell, you get to party and drink and eat and fuck all day, but you have to go to bed at midnight, and just before that, you're given a bucket of human shit, and you eat it or it's force fed to you."

The Soviet says: "Our Hell is the same, except that on even days they're out of buckets, and on uneven days they don't have shit."

The DDR finally launched its first satellite. It's orbiting around the one the Soviets launched last week.

The crops had failed once again in the USSR, so the Premier had no choice but to go on national radio and declare: "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that we're all out of food, and will have to eat shit for the rest of the year. The good news is that we have enormous stocks of it."

A judge at a Soviet court was laughing his ass of. He could hardly breathe. A lawyer happened past and asked him what was so funny. The judge said that he had just heard the funniest joke he's ever heard. The lawyer wanted to hear it, but the judge refused: "I just gave 20 years to the guy who told it to me!"

@Best Of: Love those. Where did you hear them? (Do they still tell them in Finland?)

I heard those jokes from a documentary about Cold War-era humour in the Warsaw Pact countries. Most of those jokes are from Russia, but other countries in the USSR or allied to it also had loads of jokes like that, especially Ukraine, Poland and the DDR.

Here's one that I first heard in Finnish, but that was also featured in the documentary:

The Trabant, as you may know, was a popular East German car in the Communist Bloc. But as usual, there was a great deal of bureaucracy involved in getting one: you had to apply for a permit to buy one before you could actually try to purchase it.

A man was standing in line for Trabant purchase licences. After having spent an entire day in the line without it getting almost anywhere, he said to the man in front of him: "That's it. I'm going to kill Khrushchev." The other guy said: "When you're done, come back here and tell me how it went. I'll try to keep your place in the line."

A week later, the would-be assassin returned. He was able to return to his place in line.

The man who held his place for him asked: "Well? How did it go?"

And the first man replied: "There was an even longer line."

BTW, Finland was never part of the Communist Bloc, though we did have a special agreement with the USSR that gave them huge influence over our politics. But not as much as the actual satellite states had.

@Best Of: Thanks for the explanation. No, I didn't know that. Oh, I get it. There was a longer line for killing Khrushchev because other people wanted to kill him for not getting the permit to buy the car.

Among other reasons to want to kill Khrushchev.

A guy was standing in line for a Trabant purchase licence. Finally, it was his turn. He went to the counter and submitted the paperwork.

"When will I get to hear a decision? And do I have to come here to fetch my licence?" he asked.

The clerk said: "Yes, you'll have to come here for the licence. And you'll get the decision on this day, 9 years from now."

The man asked: "In the morning or in the afternoon?"

Clerk: "Does it really matter?"

"Yes. You see, the plumber's coming in the morning."

My friend's motto is love thy neighbour. He lives next to a brothel.

What's worse than ten dead babies in one trashcan? One dead baby in ten trashcans.

I've loved the same woman for 17 years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me.

How many dead babies does it take to paint a house? Depends on how hard you throw them.

Politics jokes are fun.

There's a Conservative MP and a Liberal Democrat MP standing on the edge of the cliff.

Which do you push off first?

The Conservative.

... Work before pleasure, remember.

What's worse than a trash can full of dead babies?

One live one at the bottom.

What's worse than that?

It eats its way out.

What's worse than that?

It comes back for seconds.

That also works as a music joke; replace "Conservative MP" with "conductor" and "Liberal MP" with "first violinist".

edited 10th Aug '12 8:09:34 AM by MasterInferno

We had a whole thread of dead baby jokes and similar ones once, anyone remember that?

There was a Labour supporter lying on his deathbed.

He then became a Tory supporter.

With his last breath he explained;

"Better one of them dies... than one of us."

"Overuse of cliched racial jokes." It was moved to YF when IJBM died, IIRC.

EDIT: I see it's locked. Oh, well.

edited 10th Aug '12 12:49:50 PM by BestOf

Scientology.

The United Nations, having heard good things about the relatively new phenomenon of "crowdsourcing", once decided to send a letter to a couple thousand randomly picked citizens from around the world, asking them: 'Please state your honest opinion on the best solution for the food shortage problem in the rest of the world.'

However noble its aim, this project failed miserably, for various reasons:

Respondents from South America didn't understand 'please'.
Respondents from Eastern Europe didn't understand 'honest'.
Respondents from China didn't understand 'opinion'.
Respondents from the Middle East didn't understand 'solution'.
Respondents from Africa didn't understand 'food'.
Respondents from Western Europe didn't understand 'shortage'.
Respondents from the United States didn't understand 'the rest of the world'.

(Best Of, your jokes are great, but I don't get the one about the elephants. Care to post/PM the clue?)

edited 10th Aug '12 5:35:58 PM by MidnightRambler

Loved that one.

I'll analyse the elephant joke.

Humour is about surprise. This is a very fundamental thing about humour that people don't always get. To illustrate this, I Googled a site for knock knock jokes and picked one at random:

The joke is that "Cash who?" is turned into "cashew," which is surprising because that's not how conversations usually go. Thing is, people have heard so many knock knock jokes that sometimes the way to get people to laugh is to spot the formula and break it, creating a new surprise.

The classic example is "Why did the chicken cross the road?" If you're used to hearing jokes, you expect an absurd answer that'll surprise you. That is exactly why you can actually be surprised by the obvious answer: "To get to the other side." It's funny precisely because it should be the obvious answer, but because it's a joke, you don't expect the obvious. (Of course, this joke has become very common, so it has lost some of its original effect.)

The elephant joke is also a really long joke. The point of long jokes is always that the huge build-up never justifies the lame pun at the end. Did you read the one about the onions that I posted near the top of the current page? That's a classic long joke with a lame pun. The humour also works because the set up is right there at the beginning, and when you get to the punchline you'll hopefully have forgotten the set up. (The set up is that the characters are onions, the story is meant to make you forget that they are onions, and when you arrive at the punchline, it doesn't make any sense until you remember the beginning - and thus you're surprised.)

The elephants and the tree is, as I said, anti-humour. It's basically a long joke version of the chicken that crossed the road: the most obvious outcome is the one you get, but you don't expect it. I made a little double play at the end, where I suggested that the little elephant might actually succeed after all. Thus, there's yet one more level that the punchline works in.

BTW, one important thing about long jokes is that usually there is a very basic structure, and certain parts where you're supposed to improvise the content. Most of the text you read in my post (and the onion joke) is stuff that I invented just for this particular telling. So there's a creative element to it, which makes it more fun for the person telling it.

The basic form of the joke is this:

The little elephant rams into a tree but tree doesn't budge; a series of escalations with bigger or stronger or faster elephants occurs; and in the end, the little elephant fails again.

Everything other than that is my invention in this telling.

I'll try to go over the point of the joke once again, just to be sure.

You're presented with a traditional formula (multiple attempts at something followed by success from an unexpected source*.)

Then I bring in the long joke formula, which makes you expect something grand if you're not used to long jokes (and thus you believe that the build-up is justified) or if you are used to long jokes, you expect a lame punchline.

In the end, I don't deliver anything. I don't deliver a punchline at all, and I completely break the expected formula by not resolving the story in the end. There's a build-up with no release, so to speak.

Here I added the additional twist of setting the small elephant up for a victory by suggesting that the tree has broken, so now there's an expectation of a happy ending or a typical lame pun. But you get neither, and thus you're surprised.

*If you don't know what I mean with the formula "multiple attempts at something followed by success from an unexpected source," here's a joke that follows that formula:

edited 10th Aug '12 6:01:25 PM by BestOf

Funniest joke in the thread so far!

A Tory MP, a nurse, a man reading the Daily Mail and a banker are sitting around a table. On the table, there is a plate with ten biscuits. Suddenly, the banker grabs nine of the ten biscuits and proceeds to eat them at great speed. A few minutes later, the Tory MP leans over to the Daily Mail reader and hisses in his ear: 'Watch out, the nurse is trying to steal your biscuit!'

A large Dutch company sends a delegation to Japan to seal a few lucrative deals and generally keep up relations with their Japanese business partners. Among the delegates is a young, up-and-coming businessman who has never been to Japan before. He has heard great things about the country, especially about the Geisha prostitutes, and he's eager to see if they're all they're cracked up to be. After dinner in the hotel where the Dutchmen are staying, he tells his boss about this. His boss says, 'Fine, go ahead and enjoy yourself; but don't make it too wild a night! Tomorrow, you're playing golf with some important Japanese company presidents, and you'll have to be well rested to leave a good impression.'

The young Dutchman heads off into the red-light district, finds a geisha, pays, and gets into bed with her. He notices that during the act, she's constantly shouting 'Sakome kiri nagate!' at him. As he thinks rather highly of his own skills in bed, he assumes this is a compliment.

The next day, he's playing golf with some Japanese businessmen, as planned. One of the Japanese scores a hole-in-one. 'Well done, ehm... sakome kiri nagate!', the Dutchman says, thinking: 'He'll definitely appreciate it when I give him a compliment in his own language.'

The Japanese man gives him a confused look and replies, 'What do you mean, I put it in the wrong hole?'