Catastrophe!

Friend-of-the-blog Patty sent Spit Takes a link to an article in today's Telegraph about people who laugh at bad jokes. According to scientists* at WSU, four in ten people laugh when told a bad joke. Of course, their sample size is small, but for the purposes of their argument, we'll assume that extrapolating from it is kosher. Their experiment consisted of telling almost 200 people this joke:

"What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?"
"Nothing! Chimneys can't talk!"

Of course, they probably could have done better if they had used a funnier "bad joke." I didn't even laugh at the chimney joke, and if I don't laugh at a bad joke, it is a baaaad joke. There are no puns, no subverted expectations, no offensive jabs--it's as if a three-year-old who has just begun to understand the concept of "joke" had tried to come up with something on her own. Off the top of my head, here are set-ups to three examples (answers at the end of the post, to heighten the suspense!) that come to mind as better bad jokes than the chimney one:

1) "What's brown and sticky?"

2) "Two muffins were sitting in a oven. The first one turned to the second and said, 'Man, it is hot in here!'"

3) "Did you hear about the fire at the circus?"

All of those are stupid, yes, but at least they require at least a little brainpower. 1 and 3 are built on wordplay, and 2 is built on the idea of setting up presumptions and then immediately tearing them down. It can be hard to pull those off, but arguably, the king of that is Steve Martin. Here's an excerpt from an SNL monologue he did in 1977. Unfortunately, I can't find it on YouTube so you'll have to project your own version of his enunciation onto the transcript (it was his smarmy, stylized-eagerness phase); my bolds are there for your convenience:

Okay! Hey, does anybody know where I can get some cat handcuffs? I've gotta get a pair of cat handcuffs. Either two little ones like this, to go around the little paws...or a big one that hooks onto my arm and then hooks onto the cat. I found out my cat was embezzling from me, so I've gotta get a little pair...of cat handcuffs, so...Well, I found out that when I'm away, he goes to the mailbox, picks up the checks, take them down to the bank and cashes them. The way I caught him, I went out to his little house, where he sleeps at night, and there was like $3,000 worth of cat toys out there. And you can't return them, because they have spit all over them. I don't know where he is now, I guess he went out to Catalina, or something like that, I don't know... [ audience groans slightly ] No. He bought a catamaran, and went out... [ audience groans again ] No, he got it out of a catalog... [ groans ] This is a catastrophe!

Ah, jeez! Terrible, but funny. This was back when Steve Martin could do both of those adjectives together, of course, instead of just one or the other...for the love of Pete(r Sellers), please let the Pink Panther franchise rest in peace.

The Telegraph article concludes with a quick explanation of why people laugh at bad jokes ("because they [are] surprised at receiving such a bad punchline"), but then, they put a little English spin on it by discussing Christmas crackers, and listing some terrible jokes compiled by a psychologist at Hertfordshire University. My favorite was

"Why were the rabbits eating the motorway?"
"It was a dual cabbageway!"

because I had to stare at it for a bit before I remembered that the British use weird words like "carriageway" in everyday speech. Har!

Got a good bad joke? Share it in the comments!

1) A stick.
2) Holy shit, a talking muffin!
3) It was in tents.

* "Scientists," really. It was a bunch of assistant English professors. No wonder this story didn't make the papers over here.