I anticipated the punchline in advance, and still found it funny. It probably would have been funnier if I hadn't seen it coming.
I immediately proceeded to discuss it with a friend, who couldn't understand what was funny about it at all.
I came up with another joke to explain to her what's funny to me about this one. I find them I find them funny for similar reasons.
A man walks into a control room. There is a big red button labeled "Nuclear Launch Button." He walks up and presses it.
A display screen next to the button reads "Input password." There is a number panel below the screen. He searches around the room, and finds a locked desk. He jimmies it open, and rummages around through it. Inside there is sheet of paper which says "Nuclear launch password: 7831662"
He returns to the number panel, and punches in 7831662. The display screen says "Code confirmed. Press again to launch." He presses the button again. "Launching nuclear arsenal."
He stares at the screen in shock. "Aw shit.... I fucked up."
This joke works by subverting a cliche, and thus how funny it is to you depends on how salient the cliche is.
It made me laugh, which is a reasonable proxy for thinking it's funny.
I suspect a lot of why it made me laugh is that I recognized the "twelve-inch pianist" template and spent the entire joke trying to anticipate what the analogous punch line could be, which set me up to be surprised by the punchline. I'd expect someone who wasn't trying to anticipate the punchline to not think it was funny.
I'm reminded of "What did the Zen master say to the counter-worker at Dunkin' Donuts? 'Large coffee and a chocolate crueller to go, please.' " Which got a huge laugh at the time, but you really had to be there.
That was one of the first "jokes" I ever heard, and I think I was nineteen when I finally realized it was supposed to be anti-humor.
Oh, yeah. That's true. I remember being mystified by that one as a child.
Teaching jokes to children is a strange business because they seem to go through a phase where they enthusiastically tell jokes that aren't funny, as if they don't appreciate humor. It hardly matters what kind of joke you tell them.
This reminds me of a less punny version of the "twelve inch pianist" joke. I think it's amusing but not hilarious.
it suddenly occurred to me that many LWers might not be familiar with the longest joke in the world. I loved it.
I insist that I don't find that joke funny. Really, it's just stupid. But for some reason I laughed for three seconds when I got to this bit:
but you have an orange for a head. How did that happen?"
Then for about 20 seconds when I got to this part:
"For my third wish -- and, this is the bit where I kinda fucked up -- I asked for an orange for a head."
Then, when I went back to find those two quotes I laughed for another 3 then 5 seconds. I also laughed three more times while writing the text of my reply.
Because he wished for an orange for a head. That's fucked up.
It wouldn't work as well if you'd never heard a joke before. It's only meta-surprising. I love it.
I guess I'm in the middle? I thought it was mildly funny.
For whatever it says about me, my all-time favorite joke is this one:
Q: What's brown and sticky? A: A stick!
"What's green, whistles, and hangs on a wall?"
"No idea"
"A Salmon!"
"Salmon aren't green!"
"So I painted it green."
"They don't hang on walls!"
"They do if you nail them up"
"Fish can't whistle!"
"Yeah, I just put that in so it wouldn't be too easy."
Suggested edits for an audience made of stereotypical LessWrongniks:
Mention, in passing that "There are three kinds of genies: Genies to whom you can safely say "I wish for you to do what I should wish for"; genies for which no wish is safe; and genies that aren't very powerful or intelligent.". Then argue which kind of genie this was.
End with "-- and, this is the bit where I kinda failed to overcome akrasia -- I asked for an orange for a head."
Suggested edits for an audience made of stereotypical LessWrongniks:
It's business as usual for a bartender, and one day as he is cleaning his bar an unusual customer walks in dressed in an expensive suit, a beautiful supermodel hanging off each arm and with a limo parked outside. Furthermore, the man has an orange for a head.
The bartender assigns high probability that the man is dressed in a costume of some sort, pretty low probability that he is hallucinating given that nothing else appears odd, low to medium probability that the talking orange-lookalike is a robot creation with a radio link to a real person elsewhere, and negligible probability that his whole understanding of the universe is wrong to the level that genies, magic and talking conscious fruit with biological connections to a human nervous system exists.
He greets the man and serves him a drink.
Alternate middle: "For my first wish I asked for an unlimited fortune. The genie became very quiet and after a minute or two, coins started appearing beside it. Then more and more, I saw the ground, the grass, rocks, all start morphing into coins more and more of them. I pocketed some and ran.
He looks around. "I hope it's not still going", he said with nervous laughter.
I thought it was a bit funny, or meta-funny perhaps. It reminds me a little of the following, which is one of my favorite jokes: http://www.miraclesalad.com/blog/archives/2006/09/quick_wit_retor.php
This is my favorite joke of all time.
I especially like when this type of joke is a bit long, because it makes the satisfaction of telling it to people who don't find it funny that much better. Is that a bit mean? So's my sense of humor.
Robot comedian that takes audience feedback, perfectly miscalibrated for my sense of humor. The TED audience thought it was fairly funny. Did you laugh?
I think you're just being parochial in your assumption that having an orange for a head is a "bad" thing.
Can you imagine the horror of a universe filled with people eternally yearning for oranges as heads, but being unable to do so because of your actions? That would make you history's greatest monster.
I'm tangentially reminded of the khepri from Perdido Street Station, a fantasy race who are described by humans as having the body of a human but a giant scarab beetle in place of a head.
They, of course, consider this an absurdly parochial description, and instead describe humans as having the body of a khepri and the head of a shaved gibbon.
I found it mildly funny. To me it was just a straightforward metahumor joke: isomorphic to "Why did the chicken cross the road?" I suppose the social elements engage the reader a bit more.
A poll! (Count me for funny, since I can't vote in my own poll.)
ETA: Note that there's a karma balance post for the poll -- since it's downvoted once per vote, it may appear as "comment score below threshold" or disappear entirely, depending on your personal settings.
See also this bit relating to Christmas Cracker bad jokes:
...He [Professor Richard Wiseman] thinks the key to the success of modern cracker jokes is precisely because they're not funny. 'If the joke is good and you tell it and it doesn't get a laugh, it's your problem. If the joke's bad and it doesn't get a laugh, then it's the joke's problem. My theory is that it's a way of not embarrassing people at Christmas.' So they're not jokes at all? 'In a sense, they're just a way of binding people together. Given the diversity around your average dinner table, it
I found it pretty funny (I love anti-humour), but not as funny as I would have if I hadn't been able to guess the punchline before I got to it.
I literally laughed out loud, and that doesn't often happen when I'm browsing the net.
Has anyone set up a poll for this?
I have used this exact joke as a test of people's sense of humor; the people I thought most similar to me in sensibility loved it; many other people don't get it.
I never heard the part "and, this is the bit where I kinda fucked up", so I guess I was telling it wrong, but it still got laughs from the sort of people who laugh at that sort of thing.
As for me? I think it's hilarious.
Summary: "A man has an orange for a head. How? Magic."
Is it still funny?
Assuming a person can actually have an orange for a head and that genies exist then this is just a straightforward story explaining how he became wealthy, desirable and fruitheaded. Like asking someone in a suit how come he's wearing a suit and he answers "because I bought one and put it on".
Assuming a person can't actually have an orange for a head, it's just a timewasting surreal story which doesn't go anywhere.
The humour is in the non-answer where an answer is ex...
Speaking of things that are funny to some and not others, an instructive example is the Orange Head joke. Usually when it's told, the audience is sharply divided into those who think it's hilarious and those who struggle to see what's funny.
Here's the Orange Head joke:
It's business as usual for a bartender, and one day as he is cleaning his bar when an unusual customer walks in. The man is dressed in an expensive suit, has a beautiful supermodel hanging off each arm, and has a limo parked outside. Furthermore, the man has an orange for a head.
The customer sits down at the bar and orders everyone a drink. He pays for it from a roll of hundreds and manages to get the attention of every woman in the joint, despite having an orange for a head.
The bartender is not a man to pry, but he feels compelled to ask about this man's life.
"Excuse me," says the bartender, "I can't help but notice that you're obviously fabulously wealthy and irresistable to women, but you have an orange for a head. How did that happen?"
So the man told his story.
"A while back, when I was penniless, I was walking along the beach and saw an old lamp, half buried in the sand. I picked it up and gave it a clean, and POOF! out popped a genie. The genie explained that he had been trapped in that lamp for two hundred years, and that he was so grateful to me for freeing him that he would give me three wishes.
"For my first wish I asked for an unlimited fortune. The genie said 'It is done!' and from then on, whenever I needed money, it was there.
"For my second wish I asked for the attention of all the most beautiful women in the world. The genie said it was done, and since then I have been able to get any woman I wanted.
"For my third wish -- and, this is the bit where I kinda fucked up -- I asked for an orange for a head."
Do you think it's funny?
If you search for this joke's key words, you'll see many pages where, after it's told, people react incredulously and ask where the joke was. Others at the same time are laughing their heads off. Here's a blog post that attempts to analyze this, though it doesn't get far.
(I personally think it's hilarious, and easily the best joke I heard last year. When I retold it at my blog, I got many concurring comments, but also comments from people who didn't see anything funny, even after those who did tried to explain what they found in it. Several people went on to convince themselves it's garbled and there must be an "original" version in which the final remark makes sense and is funny - and offered several ideas of how it might go).