Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Note: This funny photo is all over the web with no attribution, but absolute props to whoever came up with it!

Nanny Ogg, who has “the true witch’s ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever,” offers world-class insight into the world of opera in Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade:

“There’s your heavy opera,
where basically people sing foreign and it goes like
‘Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh, I am dyin’, oh, oh, oh, that’s what I’m doin”,
and there’s your light opera,
where they sing in foreign and it basically goes
‘Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!’,
although sometimes they drink champagne instead.”

If you came here to watch me ding AccordionGuy aka Joey De Villa aka the guru of TuCows’ geek forum— wait for it.

First, a brief word on my non-sponsor, the group link blog called “del.icio.us.”

blogged it first

Haarlem and Utrecht.

lyrics, thanks to rojisan.

A man in Topeka, Kansas, decided to write a book about churches around the world. He started by flying to San Francisco, and working east from there. Going to a very large church, he began taking photographs and making notes. He spotted a golden telephone on the vestibule wall and was intrigued with a sign which read ” $10,000 a minute.”

Seeking out the pastor he asked about the phone and the sign. The pastor said this golden phone is, in fact, a direct line to Heaven and if he pays he can talk directly to God. The man thanked the pastor and continued on his way.

As he continued to visit churches in Seattle, Virginia, Michigan, Chicago, Milwaukee, and all around the World, he found more phones, with the same sign, and the same answer from each pastor.

Finally, he arrived in Ireland. Upon entering a church in Dublin, behold, he saw the usual golden telephone. But THIS time, the sign read “Calls: 35 cents.”

Fascinated, he asked to talk to the pastor. “Father, I have been in cities all across the world and in each church I have found this golden telephone and have been told it is a direct line to Heaven and that I could talk to God, but, in the other churches the cost was $10,000 a minute. Your sign reads 35 cents a call. Why?

The pastor, smiling benignly, replied, “Son, you’re in Ireland now….it’s a local call.”

This just in, from the same group of brilliant minds who brought me StrongBad, the muffin joke, and Snoop Doggy Dizzle…..

Some wonderfully crazy LiveJournal dude has assembled the IM logs of
Kim Jong Il.

I blushingly admit to enjoying his conversations with a certain former Iraqi leader who now goes by handles like “TheSaddamizer”, “SunniSideUp”, and “WeaponsOfAssDestruction”–not to mention Kim’s earlier chats with “Bush43” and “BreakTheseCheneysOfLove”.

The humor is neither gentle nor PC. It’s kid stuff, and I freely admit I loved it.

A bunch of muffins in the oven, and the first muffin says: “Wooo, it’s getting hot.”

The second muffin says:

.

.

[wait for it]

.

.

[wait some more for it]

.

.

[waiting is part of the fun when you’re waiting for punch lines*]

.

.

The second muffin says: “YAAAHHHHH!!!!! A talking MUFFIN!!!”

What makes this joke funny?

• Like most jokes, congruity plus surprise–mmm, maybe a bit more surprise than congruity.
• Congruity: I’ve heard a million jokes where objects talk–describing an oven as hot takes me further down the road toward imagining I know what’s going on–now I expect something silly about hot ovens.
• Surprise: I get surprised when someone screams, don’t you?
• Surprise: Oh–it’s the second muffin screaming, not my friend.
• Surprise + Congruity: The second muffin takes us up a level, out of the joke, back into the real world where–oh yeah, now I remember–muffins don’t talk.
• Plus about 8 more levels of mystification about whether muffins that talk believe muffins don’t talk.

This joke, alas, is funnier heard than when read. Joketellers have the advantage over jokewriters of more subtle delays–and much, much better screams.

This guy was on the side of the road hitchhiking on a real dark night in the middle of a thunder storm. Time passed slowly and no cars went by.

It was raining so hard he could hardly see his hand in front of his face.

Suddenly he saw a car moving slowly approaching and appearing ghostlike in the rain. It slowly crept toward him and stopped. Wanting a ride real bad the guy jumped in the car and closed the door — only then did he realize that there was nobody behind the wheel.

The car slowly started moving and the guy was terrified, too scared to think of jumping out and running. The guy saw that the car was slowly approaching a sharp curve, still too scared to jump out, he started to pray and begging for his life; he was sure the ghost car would go off the road and in the bayou and he would surely drown, when just before the curve, a hand appeared thru the driver’s window and turned the steering wheel, guiding the car safely around the bend.

Paralyzed with fear, the guy watched the hand reappear every time they reached a curve. Finally the guy scared to near death had all he could take and jumped out of the car and ran to town.

Wet and in shock, he went into a bar and voice quavering, ordered two shots of whiskey, then told everybody about his supernatural experience. A silence fell over the room and people got goose bumps as they realized–this guy was not just some drunk, he was telling the truth.

About half an hour later two guys walked into the bar and one says to the other, “Look Boudreaux, ders dat idiot that rode in our car when we was pushin it in the rain.”

If you have these symptoms, the virus has already hit you:

1. You suddenly notice you sent the same email twice.
2. You suddenly notice you just sent a blank email.
3. You suddenly notice you sent email to the wrong person.
4. You realize you just sent an email right back to the person who sent it to you.
5. You realize you somehow forgot to attach an attachment.
6. You realize you just hit “SEND”–before you were finished.
7. You realize you just hit “DELETE” instead of “SEND.”

Norton and MacAfee don’t know how to stop this sinister virus, which seems to attack mainly users born before 1953.

It’s called the “C-Nile Virus.”

I usually hate getting email with virus news, but I’d really like to thank my brother Kevin for this timely warning.

Why do elephants paint their toenails red? So they can hide in cherry trees.

I once bought a book of surrealist humor, and boy, non sequitur jokes lose flavor faster than yesterday’s gum unstuck from your brother’s bedpost. Terry Pratchett has mastered a different, funnier trick I call a “con sequitur”, with “con” as in “con man” or “confidence trick.”

That is, Pratchett sets you up with some confident sense of what he’s about to say–then, just as you glimpse the banana peel under your foot, he sneaks up and pulls the rug out from under it. You end up someplace you never expected to go–though it makes perfect sense, now you come to notice. Some examples:

(The wizard) “drew himself up to his full width…” (Equal Rites, 181)

(Granny Weatherwax thinks about bringing her goats to the slums of Ankh-Morpork) “The smell might be a problem, but the goats would just have to learn to deal with it.”  (Equal Rites, 165)

“Granny had nothing against fortune-telling as long as it was done badly by someone who had no talent for it.”  (Equal Rites, 187)

“…the far reaches of the multiplexed cosmos known to the few astrophysicists who have taken really bad acid.”  (Mort, 49)

My own non-sequitur here: I discovered Discworld just before leaving for Sweden, and I was disappointed that Uppsala’s English bookstore had no Terry Pratchett in its sci fi section. I was disappointed until I noticed they had given Pratchett his own separate little bookcase. Woo hoo! If you aren’t already an addict, I urge you to try one–just one. I started with Light Fantastic. But I can quit anytime I want, honest….

xxx

Roger Rosenblatt Anything can Happen