"Jokes"

May 14, 2007

A comprehensive and completely nondescriptive list of all the joke-like things, mostly awful puns, published on these pages, in composing which I was often confronted with not really knowing if something should really count as a "joke" or even "joke-like" thing, with the result that some of the below, though not formally jokes, are included because their interestingness or amusingness is primarily linguistic (eg nine), though I have excluded many things, including mock paper titles (eg), which, by the previous criterion, I ought to have included.  In fact, I ended up being mostly formal anyway, probably because one the one hand I want to be able to demonstrate that I used to be clever, dammit! so I want to include many instances of cleverness (because I'm aware that producing retrospective posts is lame), but on the other hand I don't want to strain the definition of "joke" any more than is already necessary to include something whose punchline is "in the end, the barque was worse than the bight" (I see that I never disclosed that one on the web, or at least not here).

One; two; three (in comments, by rone); four; five; six (potentially); seven; eight; nine; ten; eleven; twelve; thirteen; fourteen; fifteen; sixteen; seventeen; eighteen; nineteen (sorta); twenty.

And then—now moving forward in time—twenty-one.  Maybe this, a twenty-second, too.

 

A twenty-third, and a somewhat meta twenty-fourth.

Two greek-based puns: twenty-five and twenty-six.

I'm not sure anyone even noticed that this was twenty-seven.  (Admittedly, it's not much of a joke.)

Twenty-eight, and bonus fake etymologies. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one, if you're generous. Certainly thirty-two, and if you're generous in a different way (I didn't make this up, but I did give it new clothing) thirty-three.

Thirty-four, talking cats; thirty-five, Westerns.

Comments

on 2007-05-14 19:19:16.0, ben wolfson commented:

Oh wait, the barque/bight thing is here, as is the famous Cleopatra joke.

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and, further, on 2007-05-18 16:39:40.0, teofilo commented:

Those would be alternate titles for the same joke, or what?

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and, further, on 2007-05-19 12:45:57.0, ben wolfson commented:

They may share a form, young teo, but they are manifestly different jokes.

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