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Broken Jokes


The Backstory
Back in the last milleneum, around 1997 or so, Richard Ford introduced us to a curious form of humor - the broken joke. He encountered it at Oxford, or so he said.

The idea is to take a standard joke, a joke that everyone knows. Instead of ending it in a surprising way, as jokes must do to achieve the cognitive dissonance that makes them jokes, you end it in the most mundane possible way, thus breaking the joke.

It turns out that this is funny, at least sometimes. It's probably because you expect the standard ending of the joke, and the usage of a more mundane ending is, itself, cognitively dissonant. Anyhow, see what you think. Personally, I find these hilarious; others think they are just stupid.

The first example of a broken joke that I heard was:

"My dog has no nose."
"Your dog has no nose?"
"Nope, no nose."
"How does he smell?"
"He can't; he has no nose!"
- Richard Ford
Here are a bunch of jokes in this genre. They seem to work best when spoken aloud. Try them out!

(I have removed traces of authorship from these jokes, a favor for which, no doubt, the authors will be eternally grateful. Thanks to Dave for collecting them and allowing me to expose them to the public.)


The Broken Jokes Themselves
A man and a dog walk into a bar. The man says to the bartender: "Will you give me a free drink if I prove to you that my dog can talk?" "That's ridiculous," says the bartender. "I'll give you two free drinks if your mutt can talk." "OK fido," says the man, "What's that over our head?" The dog replies instantly, "Roof!" "Great," says the man, "Now, who's the greatest baseball player of all time?" "Ruth!" says the dog. "Get outta here, you bums. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." As the man and dog walk out of the bar, the dog looks up at the man and says "Arf!"

"Excuse me, but you've got a banana in your ear."
"Yes, I know!"

"Take my wife, for example."

This guy walks into a bar with a chicken and an alligator.
The guy says to the bartender "I'll have a Scotch and soda." The alligator says "I'll have a Martini."
"That's amazing," says the bartender, "that alligator can talk!"
"Actually," says the guy, "I'm a ventriloquist."

I just flew in from the Coast. Gosh, it was a long flight.

Q: What do you call a banana peal?
A: A banana peal.

Q: How do you get off of an elephant?
A: You don't! You get off of a duck.

"Would you sleep with me for, oh, a billion dollars?"
"You don't have a billion dollars!"
"Just hypothetically."
"Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess I would."
"Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?"
"Of course not!! I'm not that kind of a person!"
"Oh! Sorry..."

Q: How many engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One.

"Waiter! What's this fly doing in my soup?"
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry sir!"

Q. What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the Potomac?
A. A lot of lawyers.

A duck walks into a drugstore and asks for some chapstick.
"Will that be cash or charge?" inquires the clerk, to which the duck replies "just put it on my ... tab".

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: I don't know.

Q: Why did the second chicken cross the road?
A: I don't know.

Yo mama's so fat she has to wear large clothes.

This ventriloquist walks into a bar with a chicken and an alligator ...

"Excuse me, sir, but you have a banana in your ear."
"Oh - thanks."

A lawyer, an IRS auditor and a venture capitalist are lost at sea in a lifeboat in the dangerous waters off the Australian coast. The boat springs a leak. They drown.

Knock, knock.
Come in.

Q: What did the blonde say when her ugly boss offered her a raise?
A: Thanks.

Q: How is a chicken different from an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement?
A: One is a domestic fowl; the other is a treaty.

Q: What did the saloon keeper say to the cowpoke who walked in with a chicken in his ten-gallon hat?
A: Nice hat.

Q: What did the Russian woman say to the Russian man when she finally got to the end of the three-mile line for beets?
A: Long line.

A farmer rows across a river with a fox, three geese, and a twenty-four pound bag of olive pits. Upon reaching the other side, he says to the fox "While I go into town, I'm leaving you in charge, Mr. Fox. When I return, these geese and olive pits better be in perfect shape, or you're in big, big trouble." The farmer hurries off. Several minutes later, the geese fall asleep.

An angry drunk turns to his companion at the bar. "Nobody ever listens to me!" he says. "Yeah," his friend replies, "me neither."

A man walks into the doctor with an eleven-inch railroad spike protruding from his forehead. "What seems to be the problem?" the doctor asks, to which the man replies "I have a railroad spike in my forehead."

So this policeman comes upon this guy on his hands and knees under a streetlight, fumbling around on the ground.

"What's the matter?" says the policeman.

"I'm looking for my keys," says the guy.

"Is this where you dropped them?" asks the policeman, and the guy replies, "Yes".

Q: How do you stop a rhino from charging?

A: Shoot it, ideally several times with a large caliber weapon.  Alternately, use a tranquilizer gun if keeping the rhino alive is important.

Q: Why did Frank Purdue cross the road?

A: To get to the other side.

There once was a man from St. Bees
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp
    When asked, "Does it hurt?"
    He replied, "No it doesn't;
But I'm glad that it wasn't a hornet."

(Shamelessly stolen from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas.)

A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet. 
"My dog's cross-eyed, is there anything you can do for him?"
"Well," says the vet, "let's have a look at him" So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth. 
Finally, he says, "I'm going to have to put him down."
"What? Because he's cross-eyed?"
"No, because he has cancer."

You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a mackerel. 

You can tune a piano, and you can also tune a guitar.

"I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith."
"What a coincidence!  I know him too."

So this guy walks into a bar with a giraffe, and he orders drinks for himself and the giraffe, and the girafe keeps drinking until it gets drunk and falls down on the floor.  The guy starts to leave, and the bartender calls after him "Hey! You can't leave that lyin' there!", and the guy says, "Oh, sorry".

A conversation between a Plurp reader and a bot.

Reader: Who's on first?

Bot: What's on second?

Reader: I don't know.

Bot: Me either.


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