Knock knock.
-Who’s there?
A hackneyed, contrived, poorly constructed sequence of unlikely events culminating in a punning take on a sexual act or minority group.
-Nah, that’s okay. I would, but just like everybody in the world, I hate jokes.
Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?
-Seriously dude, stop it. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Why do people tell jokes? No one likes them. They aren’t funny. They are as poor a substitute for actual humor as they are for actual human interaction. And they are never based on any sort of reality. “So there’s this kid named Johnny Fuckerfaster…” No, there isn’t. There has never been and there never will be any human being with the surname “Fuckerfaster”. Come on. (And by the way, just by hearing the first line of the joke, you can pretty much figure out what the rest of it is. Are you laughing yet?)
Let’s take a look at a representative joke, found on a website reportedly devoted to “humor”. Here it is, possibly the most nonsensical, least believable joke ever devised.
Ding Dong
There was a lady who was in bed with her lover one day, when she hears a noise and realizes that her husband is home early from work. She has no idea what to do with her lover so she sticks him in the closet and successfully covers up every part of his body except his balls. Thinking quick, she paints his balls red with some spray paint.
Her husband comes up to the bedroom and opens the closet doors to get out some clothes and notices the red balls hanging there. "What are these?" he asks.
"Oh, those are just some Christmas Bells I picked up on sale this afternoon," she answers.
He toys with them for a second and realizes that they are not making noise, so he pulls them apart and clangs them together, but all he hears is "uuuggghhh".
He says, "Honey, these things aren't working right, let me try again." So he pulls them farther apart and bangs them together. Still the only noise made is "UUUGGGHHH".
He is beginning to get a little annoyed and he says, "I am gonna try once more and if these things do not chime, I am gonna throw them in the fireplace and burn them." So he stretches them as far apart as he can and slams them together.
At that moment, the guy sticks his head out of the closet and screams, "DING DONG, DING DONG, DING DONG!!!!And of course the final, unwritten line, spoken by the husband, “Aha, these bells seem to be in fine working order after all. My faulty cognitive abilities have allowed me to hold a man’s scrotum in my hand and believe that it was a set of bells, so it’s completely conceivable to me that although I see a man screaming, that sound is most likely the gentle chiming of these new Christmas bells. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, honey.”
If the events depicted here were to actually occur, the earth would reverse polarity, the oceans would dry up, and the dead would rise from their graves.
First of all, it seems a little shortsighted to name the joke after the punchline. Typically, you would want to keep the punchline a secret until the end of the joke. By telecasting it at the beginning, it’s like (wait for it…) premature e-joke-ulation!!!!11!! (I am truly sorry. I realize that I am part of the disease, although I strive to be a part of the cure)
Secondly, the wife covers up “every part of his body except his balls”? What? What’s she covering him up with, a sheet with a ball-sack sized hole in it? And she apparently doesn’t have time to cover up his balls, but she has time to get a can of spray paint and paint his balls? That’s “thinking quick,” all right.
“I know what I’ll do, I’ll cover up every part of him except his balls which I’ll spray paint red, so that on the off chance my husband does open the closet, I’ll just tell him that they are Christmas bells.” And, you know what? It worked.
The safest bet here is to assume that the three participants of the joke are developmentally disabled. This is the only way the joke could possibly make sense. So it’s really sad more than anything else. It’s just as likely that the guy would poke his head out of the closet and say, “I like fried chicken!” or “Dinosaurs are mean! Dinosaurs go ‘rahr’!” There’s nothing funny about the quiet dignity of the retarded. They’re just trying to make sense out of this crazy world, just like the rest of us.
So let’s all agree to stop telling jokes. For the good of society. And our children. If we all band together to rid the world of the tyranny of joke telling, we will finally be free to laugh again. I envision a world where the only acceptable response to the query, “Want to hear a joke?” is “Only if you’ll let me jerk off in your hair.”
