Friday, January 1, 2010

How to ruin a joke

My showerhead is blessed by 'Our Lady of Perpetual Pressure Fluctuation'

With soap suds on my eyes,wet and naked, I keep having to follow the
variable and fluctuating parabola of my shower jet.

Twice.
That's how many times I banged my head trying to catch the water jet.
That was just today morning.

Well...I've really got nothing else to say.
But I thought it was incredibly smart of me to come up with 'Our Lady
of Perpetual Fluctuation'

'Our lady of Perpetual Pressure Fluctuation' causes 'Our Bather the
constant Sucker'

I guess the second one is not that funny.

Well, you win some,you lose some.

How to spoil a joke: A mini tutorial
------------------------------------

A couple just got married and on the night of their honeymoon before
the passionate love, the wife tells the husband"Please be gentle, I'm
still a virgin."
The husband being shocked
(Spoiler 1 :I'd be shocked too!)
replied, "How's this possible?You've been married thrice
before."(Spoiler 2 :This woman is a serial wedder.The man is crazy to
have married her after 3 men)
The wife responds,"Well, my first husband was a gynecologist and all
he wanted to do was look at it(Spoiler 3: Was the gyno a
workoholic?).My second husband was a psychiatrist and all he wanted to
do was talk about it.Finally, my third husband was a stamp collector
and all he wanted to do was...oh, I do miss him!"

(Spoiler 3:Gee...what do stamp collectors do?They seem to be more
popular than postmen and milkmen these days.)




A frog joke:

A magical frog was trapped in thornbush.A passing woman noticed his
cries for help.The frog said,"If you help me, I have power to grant
you 3 wishes. (spoiler 1:Couldn't the magical frog wish itself out of
the thornbush?)

The woman freed the frog, and the frog said,"Thank you, but I failed
to mention that there was a condition to your wishes.Whatever you wish
for , your husband will get times ten!"
(Spoiler 2 & 3:The woman should have said "Fuck the wishes.I'm taking
you to the news.A talking frog is worth 15 min of free airtime!
How did the frog know the marital status of the woman.Suppose she was
a widower.Then what?)

For her 1st wish, the woman wanted to be the most beautiful woman in
the world.(any comments here and I'll be branded a misogynist.Oh
wait.I already am one)
Her husband was instantly the most handsome man in the world.(Spoiler
4:How did the frog evaluate beauty? Was it 'Beauty by a frogs
standards...you know warts and all, judged by a jury of his amphibious
peers or beauty as judged by people?)

For her second wish, she wanted to be the richest woman in the
world.Instantly her husband became the richest man in the world by a
factor of ten.
(Spoiler 5:Now since the husband and wife had most of the world's
money, did that create a global economic instability? Is the magical
frog the reason why the current global economic recession is so bad?
Wouldn't rich fat bankers and greedy politicians be happy to blame the
magical frog and wash their hands off?)

For her last wish, she wished for a mild heart attack.

Moral of the story:Women are clever.Don't MESS WITH THEM.

Spoiler 6:However, the man had a heart attack ten times milder than his wife!

Moral of the story:Women think they are smart.Let them continue to
think that way and just enjoy the show.

Epilogue spoiler : Now that both the husband and wife had changed. i.e
were handsome and rich,they didn't recognise their own spouses.They
did not even recognise themselves in the mirror anymore.They were all
alone.(maybe not...all that money and good looks must have gotten them
some company)
They had serious life long identity crisis issues to deal with and
both their psychiatrists got rich by just' Talking about it'


HUMOR AND GENDER
A number of studies were conducted over the past four decades to
investigate gender differences in various aspects of humor. Many
additional studies, although not specifically focusing on gender,
reported comparisons of the responses of male and female participants.
Consequently, there is a large amount of data on gender differences in
humor (see Lampert and Ervin-Tripp, 1998, for a review of this
literature).
Much of the early theory and research, prior to the emergence of the
women’s movement,suggested that, “when it comes to humor, men are more
likely to joke, tease,and kid, whereas women are more likely to act as
an appreciative audience than to produce humor of their own” (Lampert
and Ervin-Tripp, 1998, p. 235). Studies of humor appreciation
generally also indicated that men were more likely than women
to enjoy humor containing aggressive and sexual themes, whereas women
were more likely to enjoy “nonsense” (i.e., nontendentious) humor
(Groch, 1974; Terry and Ertel, 1974; W. Wilson, 1975). In addition,
there was some evidence that both men and women tended to enjoy jokes
making fun of women more than jokes targeting men (Cantor, 1976; Losco
and Epstein, 1975).

But when Mary Crawford and Diane Gressley (1991) administered a
68-item questionnaire to men and women, asking them about their
typical appreciation and creation of humor involving a broad range of
topics, styles, and types of humor. Overall, men and women showed more
similarities than differences in their responses.
No gender differences were found, for example, for creativity in humor
production, tendency to laugh at oneself, enjoyment of cartoons and
comic strips in newspapers and magazines, and enjoyment of sexual
humor. However, men reported greater enjoyment and creation of hostile
humor, a greater tendency to tell canned jokes, and greater enjoyment
of slapstick comedy. On the other hand, women reported greater use of
anecdotal humor, such as recounting funny stories about things that
happen to themselves or others.

These gender differences in humorous discourse may be understood in
terms of the way gender is expressed in social interactions more
generally (Crawford, 1992; 2003). According to Deborah Tannen (1986;
1990), men and women have somewhat different conversational goals: for
women, the primary goal of friendly conversation is intimacy, whereas
for men the goal is positive self-presentation. These different goals
are also reflected in the ways men and women use humor. Women more
often use humor to enhance group solidarity and intimacy through
self-disclosure and mild self-deprecation, whereas men more often use
humor for the purpose of impressing others, appearing funny, and
creating a positive personal identity. Thus, humor is a mode of
communication that, along with more serious communication, is used to
achieve gender-relevant social goals.

-Source:An Integrative approach to Psychology of Humour

(Reading this book will tell you exactly how to spoil a joke.They even
have flowcharts explaining the inner workings of a joke.
The setup, story and the punchlines are routinely hacked and dissected
and then dumped away in the annals of academia such as this book.These
books are usually reserved for annals rap.(Sorry Bad joke)

I bet you thought computers had no sense of humour.
Turns out you're wrong as usual.
A software called JAPE(Joke Analysis & Production Engine) produces
punning riddles like this one :What do you call a ferocious nude? A
grissly bare!

The joke is generated using a large dictionary which has the following
data: phonetic pronunciation, lexical usage, and syntactic meaning and
other semantic rules that usually look for synonymy and suitable word
pairs for puns)

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