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(Semi-)Intellectual jokes

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Recently, the post <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1h1cyg/whats_the_most_intellectual_joke_you_know/" source="Reddit" author="">What's the most intellectual joke you know?</a> got a lot of play and a tremendous number of suggestions. I dug through what were rated the top 500 replies and extracted and collated my favorites. <h>Computer Science</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">The programmer's wife tells him: "Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen." The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.</bq> </ul> <h>Networking</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you may not get it.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">I prefer IP jokes; it's all in the delivery.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">I could tell you a joke about TCP, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.</bq> </ul> <h>(Mis)counting</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">There are two types of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure.</bq> </ul> <h>The Classics</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">An Irishman goes to a building site for his first day of work, and a couple of Englishmen think, "Ah, we'll have some fun with him!" So they walk up and say, "Hey, Paddy, as you're new here make sure you know a joist from a girder..." "Ah, sure, I knows" says Paddy, "twas Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust."</bq> </ul> <h>Math & Physics</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">A hundred kilopascals go into a bar.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Entropy isn't what it used to be.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Q: What do you get when you put root beer in a square glass? A: Beer</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Q: What does the "B" in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot.<fn></bq> <bq quote_style="none">First Law of Thermodynamics: You can't win. Second Law of Thermodynamics: You can't break even. Third Law of Thermodynamics: You can't stop playing.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">A biologist, a chemist, and a statistician are out hunting. The biologist shoots at a deer and misses 5ft to the left, the chemist takes a shot and misses 5ft to the right, the statistician yells "We got 'em!"</bq> <bq quote_style="none">An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician just got out of a lecture regarding the geometry of 4-dimensional space. The engineer says, "I had a really hard time visualizing in four dimensions." The physicist says "Oh, it's easy, just think of the 4th dimension as time" The mathematician says "It's even easier than that - just think about n-dimensional space and then set n to 4"</bq> </ul> <h>Romans & Germans</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">A Roman walks into a bar and asks for a martinus. "You mean a martini?" the bartender asks. The Roman replies, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it!"</bq> <bq quote_style="none">A German walks into a bar and asks for a martini. The bartender asks "dry?" He replies "nein, just one"</bq> <bq quote_style="none">According to Sigmund Freud, what comes between fear and sex? Fünf.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Angela Merkel arrives at Passport Control at Paris airport. "Nationality?" asks the immigration officer. "German," she replies. "Occupation?" "No, just here for a few days."</bq> </ul> <h>Engineers & Economists</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">A pastor, a doctor and an engineer are on a golf course behind an especially slow group. When the marshal comes around, they decide to ask him what the deal is. He tells them the slow play is because it is a group of blind firefighters, who saved the clubhouse from a fire that blinded them, so they get to play for free. The pastor proclaims "That is terrible, I will say a prayer for them." The doctor says "I can contact an ophthalmologist friend who has done wonders with the blind." The engineer asks "Why don't they just play at night?"</bq> <bq quote_style="none">An engineer, an economist, and a philosopher are hiking through the hills of Scotland. On the top of a hill they see a black sheep. "What do you know," the engineer remarks. "The sheep in Scotland are black." "No, no", protests the economist. "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is black." The philosopher considers this a moment. "That's not quite right. There's at least one sheep which is black from one side."</bq> </ul> <h>Heisenberg</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">I hear Heisenberg and his wife are having problems; When he has the time, he doesn't have the energy, and when he has the position, he can't get the momentum.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Heisenberg was speeding down the highway. Cop pulled him over and says "Son, do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?" Heisenberg said, "No, but I knew where I was"</bq> <bq quote_style="none">The cop says "You were doing 100 miles an hour" to which Heisenberg replies "Great, now I'm lost".</bq> </ul> <h>Philosophy & Linguistics</h> <ul> <bq quote_style="none">Your mother is so classless, she could be a Marxist utopia.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?</bq> <bq quote_style="none">What's the difference between ignorance and indifference? I don't know and I don't care.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">A Buddhist monk approaches a hot-dog stand and says "make me one with everything".</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Sometimes to sound smart I just masturbate a big word into a sentence even when I don't know its meaning.<fn></bq> <bq quote_style="none">It's hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Due to cultural sensitives and issues with genocide, Crayola is going to stop using the the name Indian Red. They're going to change it to Khmer Rouge.</bq> <bq quote_style="none">Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, "Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it's funny or not?" Gödel replies, "We can't know that because we're inside the joke." Chomsky says, "Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong."<fn></bq> <bq quote_style="none">Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French café, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, "I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream." The waitress replies, "I'm sorry, Monsieur, but we're out of cream. How about with no milk?"<fn></bq> <bq quote_style="none">Four dons were walking down an Oxford street one evening. All were philologists and members of the English department. They were discussing group nouns: a covey of quail, a pride of lions, an exaltation of larks. As they talked, they passed four ladies of the evening. The dons did not exactly ignore the hussies—in a literary way, that is. One of them asked: “How would you describe a group like that?” Suggested the first: “A jam of tarts?” The second: “A flourish of strumpets?” The third: “An essay of trollops?” Then the dean of the dons, the eldest and most scholarly of them all, closed the discussion: “I wish that you gentlemen would consider 'an anthology of pros.' “</bq> <bq quote_style="none">A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day and said "In English, a double negative forms a positive. But in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However," he pointed out, "in no language in the world can a double positive form a negative." But then a voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."</bq> </ul> <hr> <ft>Mandelbrot is a mathematician most commonly associated with fractal geometry. The play here is on the nature of fractals (citing the article <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_geometry" source="Wikipedia">Fractal</a>): <bq>Fractals are typically self-similar patterns, where self-similar means they are "the same from near as from far".[3] Fractals may be exactly the same at every scale, or, as illustrated in Figure 1, they may be nearly the same at different scales</bq></ft> <ft>This one would work equally well with "expectorate", "micturate" or "defecate", depending on whether the audience would appreciate the shock value of the original choice.</ft> <ft>Again, from Reddit, as explained by someone more familiar with Chomsky's linguisitc theories than I: <bq>[...] but Chomsky is a linguist who is famous for his theory of linguistic competence. To put it on a bumper sticker, his theory holds that "performance does not equal competence". In other words, he thinks that linguistic analysis should be concerned with the "ideal" version of language, which he distinguishes from the version actually spoken by the speakers of the language. One of his reasons for this is that the performed version of the language can include errors by the speaker that do not actually shed light on the language itself. So in the joke, Chomsky is saying that the ideal version of the joke is funny, even if the spoken version of the joke is not. He believes that there is a distinction between an ideal competently spoken version of the joke and the actually spoken version of the joke, and that the ideal version of the joke is the "real" version.</bq></ft> <ft>As nicely explained in the joke thread on Reddit: <bq>Sartre wrote about choice, but that joke is obviously referencing his notion of nothingness, which he took to mean a physical nothing, rather than the simple lack of a something. He famously put this to analogy with his story about Pierre. You go to the café to meet your friend Pierre, but when you arrive, he’s not there. What you feel is the active LACK of Pierre. You look around expecting to see him but you do not. He is a nothingness that is felt. So the joke about “no cream” is turned around with a nothingness of milk.</bq></ft>