Some jokes make you instantly laugh, whereas some jokes require a little mental processing before the humor lands.
The bar was low
A guy walks into a bar.
His friend ducks.
It’s only after understanding that the bar is not a place with booze that you laugh. The first guy actually walked into a metal or wood bar. His friend saw it and avoided it.
A grammar emergency
The past, present and future walk into a bar.
It was tense.
The point of the joke is hidden in “tense.” While a situation can be tense, past, present and future are also grammatical tenses.
The missing piece
Two men walk into a restaurant.
“I’ll have H2O,” says the first.
“I’ll have H2O too,” says the second.
The second man dies.
If you read “H₂O, too” as H₂O₂, you just accidentally drank hydrogen peroxide when you ordered water. The good news is, this is a chemistry joke, not a real life situation at a restaurant.
Reading between the lines
“I have a split personality,” said Tom, being Frank.
The sentence appears normal until you realize “Frank” can be both a person’s name (name of his other personality) and an adjective for honest or straightforward. Literally, Tom is being Frank.
A matter of perspective
There are two kinds of people in the world:
Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
That’s it. The missing second type is the joke: you have to extrapolate what it would be yourself.
The Roman order
A Roman walks into a tavern. He holds up two fingers and says, “Five beers, please.”
Two fingers form a V. V is five in Roman numerals. So he’s ordering five beers without actually holding up five fingers.
The mathematical problem
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a tavern.
The first one orders one beer. The second orders a beer half full. The third orders a beer quarter full.
The bartender pours out two full beers and says, “You guys need to know your limits.”
The orders make up an infinite geometric series: 1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛ + … Its limit is 2, so the bartender knows how much beer they’ll eventually order.
Technically correct
A logician’s wife tells him, “Go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”
He returns with 12 loaves of bread.
He took her words literally. “If they have eggs, buy a dozen” meant buy a dozen loaves of the previously mentioned bread. This joke relies on interpreting normal language as if it were computer programming.
Know your audience
A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are observing a house.
Two people walk in. Then three people walk out.
The biologist says, “They must have reproduced.”
The physicist says, “Well, there must have been a measurement error.”
The mathematician says, “If one more person enters the house, it will be empty.”
For the mathematician, the number of people inside is an equation: 0 + 2 – 3 = –1. Bring in one more person, and you’re mathematically at zero people inside the house again.
The double negative
“A double negative in some languages translates to a positive. But in no known language does a double positive equal a negative,” says a professor of linguistics.
From the back of the room, a student calls out, “Yeah, right.”
“Yeah” and “right” are both positive words. But saying them together sarcastically can mean the complete opposite.
Schrödinger’s answer
Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar.
And doesn’t.
This joke uses a famous thought experiment where a cat exists in a state of being both alive and dead until observed. This joke plays on that idea, making us wonder if the cat actually stepped inside the bar.
The ultimate shortcut
Why was six afraid of seven?
Because seven eight nine.
That one’s old. Why did seven eat nine?
Because you should eat three squared meals a day.
“Three squared” is read as 3², or 9. This riddle puts a mathematical spin on the phrase “three square meals.”
Boy or girl?
A logician’s wife just had a baby.
The doctor brings the baby in and hands it to the father.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” asks the wife.
“Yes,” replies the logician.
This joke uses Boolean logic, where “boy OR girl” is true (“Yes”) if either of the two cases is true. The logician sees the question as asking if either of the two conditions are true, not which condition holds.
Classical translation
A Latin professor walks into a bar and orders a martius.
The bartender stares blankly at him and replies, “Don’t you mean martini?”
“If I wanted two,” snaps the professor, “I’d ask for one.”
In Latin grammar, -us is a singular noun ending and -i is the plural noun ending. The scholar is asking for “martinus” because “martini” sounds like he is ordering a plural form of the noun, which means multiple drinks.
A question of space
Two parallel lines have so much in common.
It’s a shame they’ll never meet.
Parallel lines never intersect because they go on forever. Their doomed destiny is determined mathematically before it starts.
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