A Joke.
Commentary: On
September 20, 2009 ~ 12 Comments
I love overly laborious shaggy-dog jokes, and I’d just been flipping through this amusingly stiff old book on humor in the Cartoon Art Museum library, so when Absurdity Matrix posted this joke on the message board I decided to build this presentation around it. Nothing like piling on additional buildup.
Oh, gosh, the androids play Keno. That’s just adorable.
I always liked the design of Stern Retro BCD-Wearing Dave, previously featured in the Spot the Non-Dave Contest the year before. No, I don’t know why he has visible pupils and Regular Dave doesn’t, at least for now. I just thought he looked better that way.
I got whiplash from this joke.
Alas, I think the key phrase that makes the joke work seems to be a USism. I’m from the UK and had to look it up on Google. That does kinda spoil the effect…
Does that Dave have white pupils and black, er, whites?
OK, David, this one’s for you …
(TUNE: “Home For The Holidays”, Robert Allen and Al Stillman, sung by Perry Como)
Oh, there’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise!
Though you go to great length for one bad pun …
If you want to leave readers in a painful daze,
We linguistic nerds think plays on words are fun!
I met a comics fan from Pommy Land;
He did a Google search
Just to find out what this joke was all about (was all about)!
A song that’s famous in the U.S.
Leaves the others in the lurch!
From Great Britain to Australia,
See, the punch line is a failure!
Oh, there’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise!
For although we’re confusing some poor bloke,
We will tell lengthy stories just to turn a phrase,
And go quite a way to make a painful joke!
Better late than lever! I mean, better Nate than never. I mean… ecch.
I appreciate that you felt that such a horrid manifestation of humour needed the scornful disapproving gaze of Public Service Announcer Dave to reassure us all that the world hadn’t gone topsy-turvy overnight… even if that wasn’t your intention at all.
As Paul Simon once pointed out, “There’s fifty ways to love your lever.” ^_^
Obviously the pupils are necessary to do the Alistair Cook closed eye pose.
AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH. *dies*
Joe Adamson in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo said, “People don’t laugh at puns. Puns aren’t funny. The nerve to say them when they aren’t asked for, that’s what’s funny.”
I laugh at puns.
David Given: I think the inner white is meant to be a “gleam in his eyes” — that is, a reflection off the pupils. The whites of his eyes naturally vanish into the chalk-white complexion of a WASP geek….. Paul Gadziowsky: An excellent point, yet it seems somehow incomplete — what about pun contests? Puns may not be funny, but they’re still witty, and that has it’s own value.
Thank you, Ed, for saving me the work. That’s hilarious that it only works in America.
Ah, beautiful. This is, almost certainly, the best thing in the whole comic.
A full-fledged short story, entertaining and amusing in its own right, leading up masterfully to a three-substitution pun on the best-known lyric from a classic Christmas carol–though I, being more of a fantasy geek, prefer “there’s no race like gnome for the hollandaise”–and also containing such wonderfully absurd notions as Mad Small-Business Ownership (and, of course, robots powered by hollandaise sauce because uranium is too expensive (note to self: see if it’s actually viable)) and generally possessing a surreal vibe reminiscent of Douglas Adams. (Not to mention the three-substitution Latin pun on Emperor Nero’s name.)
I applaud the form “Lupins Madblood”.