We gather here today to examine what may be termed the unjoke ^{(Footnote 1)}. I refer, of course, to a joke along the lines of the one alluded to in the title above — the sort where the joke turns out not really be a joke. Or at least not of the traditional variety. The world’s most famous of such gags, the colossus of the genre if you will, is the one about why the chicken crossed the road. And I’d bet you scotch to soda water that you never thought it was funny.

Neither have I, although I’ve thought long and hard about that chicken and his lack of adventures over the years, which is probably a deeply weird thing to admit. First of all, let’s be fair to the thing: it never was the kind of joke that was meant to be a knee-slapper. More like it was intended to elicit an eye role, a groan, and, if lucky, a suppressed smile. Even so, I doubt that anyone currently alive has found it even mildly amusing upon first hearing. That’s not because it isn’t humorous, in its way. It’s because we all heard it way too soon.

It’s odd that I don’t remember the first time I heard the chicken riddle considering I have a strong memory of the joke my entire family considers its natural companion. I refer here to the question of why a fireman wears red suspenders. These two closely related riddles have always been nigh unto the cojoined twins of gaggery and I have little doubt my father asked me about the chicken and the road immediately prior to posing the one about the fireman and suspenders. Both jokes offer what pretends to be a classic kiddie riddle, an odd question promising a silly answer. Instead, the answer is a surprisingly (and therefore supposedly humorous) one.

But there is a big difference between the two. Look at them closely and see how quickly you spot it.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.
Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? To hold his pants up.

The first relies exclusively on the surprise of having a silly question answered with unexpected logic. While the second features unexpected logic as well, it also relies heavily on the misdirection provided by the word “red.” The listener is expecting a reason why the fireman wears red suspenders, and is instead given the reason why he wears red suspenders.

Even though that misdirection makes the fireman joke a more traditional sort of funny, I didn’t get it my first time around. That was circa my early-middle single digits, I didn’t get either one of them. I clearly remember thinking,”what’s funny about that?” I can’t swear to it but I suspect I came to understand the one about the red suspenders before the one about getting to the other side.

With all their kiddieness and triteness, having heard them all our lives, it’s easy to miss the fact that the chicken joke especially is a very sophisticated piece of humor. Or rather, it requires a fairly high level of humor sophistication. Compare it with other children’s classics like, “What’s the biggest pencil in the world? Pennsylvania.” Or “Why did the elephant paint his toenails red? So he could hide in cherry trees.” These giggle-generators depend only on the childish delight in silliness. It doesn’t take much knowledge of jokes to understanding that equating a state with a writing instrument is just plain ridiculous, as is the idea of elephants hiding in trees. The chicken and road riddle, on the other hand, requires deeper intuitive understanding of how jokes work. The listener must be able to hear it on the meta level, the double twist of the logical answer appearing in place of the silly one is humorous in itself. At least it can be.

But what about this one?
Q: What’s the biggest pencil in the world?
A: The 76′ 3″, 21,700 lb pencil created by Ashrita Furman and members of New York’s Sri Chinmoy Centre on August 27th, 2007. ^{(Footnote 2)}

Is that funny? Maybe, depending on the context. In a trivia contest, absolutely not. Presented as a riddle, it might be amusing (in a smart-assy kinda way) to somebody who’s expecting you to say “Pennsylvania.” My point is that telling the chicken/road joke to tyke unsophisticated in the ways of riddles is pretty much the same as telling giving the 76-foot-et cetera “punch line” to somebody who never heard the Pennsylvania version. Nobody is going to find humor in the chicken and the road until they’re sophisticated enough in jokesterism to see that replacing the silly answer with a logical one is silly in itself.

In my family, we soon delighted in the chicken and the fireman purely for the oddity of their apparent lack of mirthfulness, leading my father, brother, and I to compound the matter by flip-flopping the jokes. “Why did the chicken cross the road? To hold his pants up. Why does a fireman wear red suspenders, to get to the other side.”

When my sister was a tyke first able to appreciate riddles her favorites were the aforementioned one about the largest pencil in the world and the related one about the largest soda in the world (Minnesota). Naturally, those soon received the same flip-flop treatment. “What’s the largest pencil in the world? Minnesota,” etc.

You know where this is going, don’t you? Before long it was, “What’s the largest pencil in the world? To get to the other side. Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? Minnesota.”

I feel that I should mention one more unjoke that I never found amusing, although I might have if things had been slightly different. I’d imagined myself to have been about 10 or 11 at the time but a quick Google check shows that I must have been 7 or 8. The family was driving home from visiting relatives and a radio announcer had a contest question. “What does a white stone become when it’s tossed into the Red River?” I near immediately told by parents that the answer should be a Red River Rock. That was the title of a then-recent 1959 song by Johnny and the Hurricanes, a rockabilly version of Red River Valley. I thought my answer vastly superior the one the radio announcer insisted on, “wet.”

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^{(Footnote 1)} And since it may be termed that, I jolly well will, at least for the present discussion.

^{(Footnote 2)} Yes, that is totally true. Likewise, the biggest soda in the world, if we’re talking about an ice cream soda, was a 15-foot-high glass filled with 2,850 gallons of vanilla Coco-Cola and 7,200 scoops of ice cream, created May 25th 2007 at the World of Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, Georgia.

The official word, the nice, polite, formal word in my 1950s/1960s childhood, was “Negro,” as in, “The United Negro College Fund.” You may remember them as the people who created that wonderful phrase, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Nowadays, we’d call it the politically correct word. Back then, we were more apt to label it simply as “respectful.”

Equally respectful, but less formal, was “Colored,” as in The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. “Black,” on the other hand, seemed at least mildly derogatory and lacking in respect.^{(Footnote 1)}

Yet, sometime in the mid 60s, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the word of choice. I didn’t like it.

My opinion was meaningless, as it should be, me being a White kid and all, but a good portion of the melanin-blessed community agreed with me. They had the same discomfort with a faintly disparaging term replacing the acknowledged respectful one. We all got outvoted, though, by the overwhelming majority of the effected population so I learned to get comfortable calling people what they wished to be called. I figured that’s what respect actually means.

I had much more trouble adapting when we awoke one day to learn that the proper term would henceforth be “African American.” Perhaps that seems strange, because “African American” never had the negative connotation that “Black” once did. Yet there were problems, a big one being utility.

Do you know that there are racists in England and Australia? In France and Spain and Germany? And in other places too? I suspect you do. Do you know what there are damned few of in any of those places? African Americans. If you want to talk about racism in any non-USA-centric manner, “African American” is not a particularly useful phrase.

In fact, should you want to discuss the joint heritage of any group of relatively recent African descent^{(Footnote 2)} in any context, “African American” is bloody damned limiting.

My other problem, and a mighty one it was, had to do with how the change came into being. While there’s no telling who first adopted “Black” as a term of pride, in the end it was a group decision. It came from the grass roots, echoing through songs like, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” and popular mantras like, “Black is Beautiful.”

“African American,” on the other hand, took a path to the top that sounded more like the beginning of a (possibly offensive) joke: “A bunch of Black leaders walked into a hotel…” They emerged a few days later to proclaim that “African American” was now the One True Term.

As with the earlier switch over to “Black,” my perception is not the one that mattered. None the less it felt like a small handful of people were pushing through a new euphemism for something that needed euphemizing about as much as my keyboard here needs a hula hoop. But you wouldn’t know that from the reaction. The announcement kicked off a weekend frenzy as folks scurried to meet Monday in full compliance. Word processors shifted into search-and-replace hyperdrive, leading to mirthful tales of business reports showing how innovations were taking operations out of the red and into the African American.

I swallowed the irrelevence of my White opinion and once again adjusted. For a while. Then I noticed that most of my Black friends and associates continued to call themselves Black unless they were referring to a context where both African descent^{(Footnote 3)} and American citizenship were an issue. It seems perfectly appropriate to discuss how a federal program will effect African American families, but my friend Bill is Black. Pele was Black, Nelson Mandela was Black, the Fifteenth Doctor is Black, Lupita Nyong’o is deliciously Black^{(Footnote 4)}, and Bill gets to bask in the same ethnic glory as they.

I do avoid “Colored,” not that it was ever one of my go-to words for much other than laundry. I don’t know how or why that term got demoted to a derogatory status notably below where “Black” sat in 1958, but it did.^{(Footnote 5)} The NAACP is still around, though, bless them.

I like to think that I’ve reached a proper balance of true respect and linguistic social responsibility. I ask only one thing of my darker-hued brethren and sistren: If you ever feel the need to update the term of pride once more, please, not “ni**a!” I don’t think I can adjust that far.

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^1: That other word was around, too. The one that has most of the same letters as “negro” but which is very definitely not. It’s not relevant this diatribe, however, so I mention it in passing only to prevent it from becoming a pachyderm behind the sofa.

^2: I specify “relatively recent” because, ultimately, every human is of African descent.

^3: See Footnote 2.

^4: Many women and some men of my acquaintance would say the same about the Fifteenth Doctor.

^5: I’m equally mystified how the word “Oriental,” as applied to people rather than carpets, came to be frowned, if not downright scowled, upon. I’ve never heard it used as anything but a neutral term and wonder if there was something going on beyond my hearing that I missed.

There’s a question that half of the world’s lovers fear but the other half loves to ask. The question is, “How much do you love me?” I’ve noticed that people prone to ask it usually wind up paired with partners who cringe at its approach.

It is, as Admiral Axkbar so aptly put it, a trap. To date, there’s been no answer unlikely to get you into trouble. Oh, sure, a small percentage of askers are happy keeping it a simple ritual of affection. These rare individuals are content to have their partners throw arms to maximum wingspan and say, “This much.” If you have such a mate, you’re a fortunate person indeed. Most want answers that will grow over time, so good luck increasing your reach.

Comparison answers are disasters in the making. “I love you more than rocky road ice cream,” may sound cute today, but one day, and you can bank on it, they’ll ask you for your dessert. And they’ll mean it!^{(Footnote 1)}

My solution came to me the fifth or sixth time my then-girlfriend-now-wife asked the dreaded question and I replied, “What’s the unit of measurement?” For a half second I felt triumphant, having tossed a preemptive impossibility back into her lap. But triumph gave way to near panic when I realized that she just might come up with something that, like dinner with the Borgias or an IRS audit, would best be avoided. F’rinstance, “Compared to your last girlfriend.” So I scrambled ahead of the risk. I blurted, “Ten point three gazortin.”

If I’d had a chance to think it through, I’d have said “1.3 gazortin,” not to minimize the amount of love but to make a gazort (the singular form) a larger increment. Creating a reasonable sounding scale would have been much easier. But I’d made my unit and now must lie in it.

Here’s how it works. The gazort is a unit of romantic love. Romantic! It cannot measure how much you love a parent, child, best friend, puppy, or rocky road ice cream. That’s important to keep you out of trouble. Your use of the gazortin applies only to the him or her making the bedeviled inquiry and to no one else (or, if it does, your asker better never learn about it).

Ten gazortin (10 Gz) is the amount of love required to honestly and happily say, “I love you.” Daydreaming about someone starts at about 4 Gz, a crush at around 6, and you’re seriously smitten at 8.

From there, the difference in numbers starts to grow sorta like the Richter Scale. The difference between 10.2 and 10.4 Gz is exponentially greater than the difference between 10.0 and 10.2. Explain that to your beloved in the beginning and repeat as needed or you’ll need to keep track of millions, billions, trillions, zillions, and gajillions as anniversaries^{(Footnote 2)} march past. A growth rate of 0.1 Gz/year is major league increasification, well beyond the growth rate of kudzu or the number wire hangers in the closet. A rate of 0.05/year is not to be snuz at, as it easily matches the achievement of any favorite happily-ever-after fictional couple.

In the spirit of Anders Celsius, Daniel Fahrenheit, Joshua Mile, and Joey Ounce (although more humble because I’m not attaching my name to it and don’t you dare do it for me!) I offer this unit to the world. Use it, share it, and may it spread contentment wider than you can spread your arms.

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¹ If you’ve already committed this mistake, there’s an out that might help you once, maybe. When they say, “But you said you loved me more than rocky road ice cream (or whatever)” you answer, “I do. Rocky road ice cream doesn’t love you near as much as I do.” Good luck.

² Not just wedding anniversaries either. Anniversaries of meeting, first date, first kiss, first time shopping for groceries together, that time the cat peed on Uncle Woodly’s suede shoes and Aunt Azalea had to be taken to the hospital after collapsing from laughing so hard, all of those and more could prompt a new ask and a need for a higher number.

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.^{(Footnote 1)}

E. B. & Kathryn White

When a bit of writing is introduced with a quote, it’s a safe bet that the person behind the keyboard intends to either defend or disprove it. As I try to be expansive of view, I’ll do a bit of both. Admittedly, the larger bit is reserved for the latter intent, because, y’know, that’s more interesting.

We’ll take the scenic route via a day when I was vacationing at an amusement park along America’s right coast. I’d been clackitied to the precipice of what had been billed as the wildest, scariest, most thrilling steel roller coaster yet devised. The plunge below seemed downright enthusiastic in its promise to deliver.

The plummet began and immediately — immediately, I tell you — the track rolled us to the underside. It seemed impossible that we could have developed sufficient speed and inertia to keep us in our seats, creating the impression that only the safety bars snug against our laps could be preventing us from taking a more direct route to the ground. The traditional screaming ensued as instinctual fear kicked in, but I, although moments ago set to join in the vocal festivities, did no such thing. I was not scared. At all!

The reason, I assure you, was neither courage nor stoicism. It wasn’t because I’d seen previous riders emerge with no ill-effects beyond slightly wobbly knees. Nor was it because I had faith in the designers’ firm grasp of Newtonian physics.

No. It was because I had been quite literally struck stupid with amazement. Any primal voice from my brain stem trying to scream, “Aaaaaah! We’re gonna die!” was drowned out by some analytical mental circuit bellowing demands to know why the bloody hell my body wasn’t even attempting to fall. The necessary pressure remained between my buttocks and the seat, not between my belly and the safety bar. It made no apparent sense and my rational mind was having none of it.

A second or so later it ended with us back atop the rails, hurtling towards a rapid bank.

Now here’s my question: Does the fact that my hair didn’t do its anticipated raising during the ride’s undisputed scariest moment mean that the coaster didn’t live up to its marketing? You could argue that. And yet what I just described was absolutely my very most favoritest roller coaster moment ever, more thrilling in its unexpected way than the usual highly hyped visceral rush.

Compare and contrast. It’s years later and once again I’m sitting, albeit stationary this time. I’m in a theater at a Society of American Magicians convention, where Jay Marshall is beginning the ventriloquist section of his act. If you’re not familiar with Jay and his hand-puppet Lefty, you’ll find a most enjoyable link below.

Marshall introduced Lefty with a joke I must have heard him tell on the Ed Sullivan show when I was a tyke, but I’d happily forgotten it. Thus, I heard at it afresh with a far-beyond-tykeness humor writer’s ears.

What followed was much like that initial twist on the aforementioned roller coaster. While the crowd around me laughed, my brain shifted gears. I sat there mouth agape, funniness analysis mode in overdrive, mentally breaking down and examining a blazing jewel of comedic crafting.

Yes, I’ll tell you the joke, but first I’ll apologize for already raising your expectations a wee bit overhigh. You see, this particular witticism was a masterpiece in the context of its birth: 1950’s/early 60’s America. It was an order of magnitude less side-splitting against the 1990’s background of that convention. I’ll never prove it, but I’d bet that if you could have mapped where the laughs originated, you’d have found that the loudest and longest sprang from the bellies of those old enough to mentally place the remark in its proper time. You can imagine, then, how I fear to disappoint you here in the 2020’s.

Keep that in mind, because here it is:

I’d like to introduce you now to a very fortunate young man. He has a wife . . . and a cigarette lighter . . . and they both work.

I expect reactions will once again correlate with age. Readers who find the line funniest will be those who best recall when an average family could live all comfy — savings and periodic new cars and vacations and everything — on one person’s income, and when the frequent failed flicking of a flip-top cigarette lighter was a universal trope. That group includes me. If it doesn’t include you, I hope you can see your way to appreciating why us geezers might bust a gut at the punchline.

At issue, however, is not how funny the joke is but how probing it with a metaphorical scalpel affects its ability to tickle. In this case, there’s enough underlying material for a CSI: Haha analysis report far longer than you’re probably willing to read. Which brings us to where the Whites and I agree.

Most people are indeed quick to lose interest in unbolting the moving parts of a joke. Presented in writing, the relationships and interactions of all the itty-bitty parts make for reading dryer than James Bond’s martinis. You’d have to be a special kind of linguistics and psychology nerd to get into it (no offense to my fellow special kinds of nerds). That’s why, way back in my first post, I made only the most cursory exploration of why my father, bother and myself differed in our reactions to a certain joke and why I won’t be doing any deep diving here, either. Instead, let me throw a few questions your way.

• Suppose Jay had reversed the order, saying instead, “…has a cigarette lighter… and a wife….?” How would that have effected the FQ (Funniness Quotient)?
• What if there were no pauses after “wife” and “cigarette lighter?”
• Would you call the use of the word “work” a pun? Why or why not?

Is the joke any less amusing after considering those questions?

I won’t kid myself, let alone you. There are, indeed, some who will say, “Yes, you ruined it for me you bastard.” Others will grin, delighted with new insight. Speaking for myself, after twenty-some years of popping bits of that gag apart and snapping them back together, I still find it a downright knee-slapper. I’d wager I’ve derived many times more mirth from it than did those who laughed heartily in the theater but who have since left it unexamined and forgotten.

That, my friend, is no dead frog. That’s a frog who rejoices in its anatomical survey, singing and dancing like Michigan J.

Comedy writer Gene Perret, who’ll no doubt be mentioned in future posts, worked on the legendary Carol Burnett Show. He told of a sign on the head writers desk reading, “There are few experts on comedy, and even they disagree.” Gene noted that while the writing staff found that droll, some thought it would be funnier if it said, “…and even we disagree.” There would be, according to Perret, long detailed arguments over the matter.

I can only imagine what a roomful of professional jokesmiths brought to those debates. I’m pretty sure they left the witticism dissected, shredded, and scrutinized umpteen ways to Shrove Tuesday. I’m even more sure that the group never stopped finding that sign funny. How do I know? Because they argued the matter repeatedly. Dead frogs do not incite such passion.

None the less, I can’t doubt that Mr. and Mrs. White were speaking the truth of their experience when they claimed that sticking one’s nose too deep into humor’s vital organs blots the giggles. I’m certain that Woody Allen, Marty Feldman, André Maurois, Barry Cryer, and others who’ve reportedly used the frog analogy since have found it true in their own lives.

The Whites and company see a joke that has ceased to be.^{(Footnote 2)} I and a bunch of Carol Burnett writers see one energized, livelier than ever. The frog is dead. The frog is alive. Schrodinger triumphs again.

But here’s where Schrodinger’s frog differs remarkably from its feline cousin. The cat remains simultaneously alive and dead only until it’s observed. Our amusing amphibian, on the other hand, maintains its dual status indefinitely, its ever variable wave form collapse depending on who, at the moment, is doing the observing.

So how does it look to you?

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Here’s Jay Marshall performing his classic Lefty act for a special event in the theater of his own Chicago magic shop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hos1XW8Dcmw

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^{(Footnote 1)} This is probably the original version of a sentiment that has often been rephrased and ascribed to others. If you prefer a different rendition (and there are good reasons why you might), feel free to mentally substitute your favorite for the one I used.

^{(Footnote 2)} Insert here the obvious portion of Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch if you’re so inclined.

Hey, look at the title of this post again. Amazing, ain’t it? Even though I’m writing about puns, I’ve resisted all temptation to use a punny headline. You know what that means? It means we’re gonna have a serious and thoughtful treatment of this subject and not merely a lot of cheap pun-filled silliness, dammit. And I say that as one who has proven many times over his capacity for a vast shining buttload of cheap pun-filled silliness. So a little respect, please.

I mean that, because when it comes to getting a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t, the pun is no Aretha Franklin. It’s more like Rodney Dangerfield. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot more depth in punology than most folks begin to suspect. Furthermore, even that unexpected depth penetrates merely the relative tip of the ice cube (forsaking here the usual imagery of the freezing North Atlantic for one of a double scotch on the rocks) when we consider the full field of wordplay (which we aren’t yet but will in time; I promise).

Today, however, we’re merely skating across the surface of that ice cube as I invite you to share a simple binary classification of puns that I’ve been using for, goshamighty, decades now: high puns and low puns. They’re best described with an example. You may know it.

A man spending the night in a monastery is treated to a supper of the best fish and chips he’s ever had in his life. When he steps into the kitchen to compliment the cook he finds one of the brothers washing dishes. Thinking it clever, he asks, “Are you the fish friar?” The brother answers, “No, I’m the chip monk.”

Okay, groan away, then take a closer look. The first joke is a high pun, signifying that both meanings of the phrase are literally true. The Brother may truly be both the fish friar and the fish frier. The second is a low pun. He can be a chip monk, but not a chipmunk. Only one of the meanings can be literally true, the other merely sounds funny.

Oddly, I’ve never seen that point made by anyone other than myself, so if you have, I’d love to know about it. Back in 1981, Art Moger wrote a compilation called The Complete Pun Book. It’s still available online for just a few bucks and well worth the trivial expense if puns are your thing. I wrote Mr. Moger about my high/low classification and told him it ought to be noted in something called The Complete Pun Book, suggesting he include it if he ever did another edition. He wrote back appreciating my point and admitting that the very idea of a “complete pun book” is an absurdity, for which he blamed the publisher. He, too, had never heard my distinctions addressed in any formal way, just as I never found out whether another edition of the book ever came out to praise my insight.

My father, brother, and I used to argue over a matter similar to the monastery puns in that it concerned a joke with at least three different and interchangeable punch lines. It told of two doctors who shared office space. The sign on the door read:

Dr. Thomas Smith, Psychiatry
Dr. Franklyn Jones, Proctology
Specialists in Odds and Ends

The other versions were, “Specialists in Nuts and Butts,” and “Specialists in Queers and Rears.” There may well have been others, but I do recall those three.

I always held, and still do, that the “odds and ends” punch line is the funniest. I find it more intellectually haha-ifying because it’s a high pun. The phrase can be considered true in both its literal and idiomatic senses. The other two aren’t even proper puns. They’re barely even wordplay.

None the less, my bother and father saved their heartiest guffaws for “nuts and butts.” I once thought that was due strictly to their earthier senses of humor, but as I’ve mentally chewed over the disagreement through the years I’ve realized that there’s more to it. For one thing, the incongruity of having such an inappropriate phrase as “nuts and butts” in a formal setting has a Marx-like tickle factor of its own. I mean like Groucho and Harpo, not Karl.

Furthermore, “butts” is just an inherently funny word. If you doubt me on that, just reread my first paragraph.

And finally, I’m not ending with a pun, either.