The thread title derives from a joke that I used to see all the time in printed lists of jokes. I’m sure I never heard anybody ever tell it verbally. I don’t think anyone would want to sit through the time it took to tell
Q: Why is a Blotter like a Lazy Dog?
A: A Blotter is an Ink-Lined Plane.
An Inclined Plane is a Lope-Up.
A Slow Pup is a Lazy Dog
That “joke” was never worth the time and trouble of telling it. Maybe they used it because they had trouble finding enough clean jokes to fill the page. It’s mildly humorous in the way it takes things on a punning logical progression from the beginning to an end that that’s not obvious.
I can’t think of any other “jokes” that take this form, but I can think of two examples that have similarities. I found one in Paul Dickson’s interesting book Family Words, which contains odd slang and word constructions used within a family and familiar to all members, but which have often appeared in other families, as well. In this case, it was the mother yelling “Nadia!” to mean “Dinner’s ready”. The logic went “Nadia is the first name of Olympic gymnast Nadia Comăneci , Comăneci sounds like “Come and Eat”. Ta-daa! I’d think this was stretch, but the same “joke” was used in my family in the late 1970s.
The only other example I can think of is in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Pellucidar” novels, set in a hollow Earth with a sun suspended in the center. One country in this imaginary world is called “Indiana”. The reasoning:
“Indiana” = “land of the Hoosiers” – “Hoosiers” sounds like “Hoojers” – “Hoojers” are followers of “Hooja the Sly”, one of the sneaky bad guys in the Pellucidar series.
Anybody else hear of any similar multi-stage punning logic “jokes”?
ALL of Cockney rhyming slang is “lazy dog”. Too convoluted and not back-trackable. If you wanna use cute code words for things, just make them up. Don’t pretend “bottle means arse” makes any sense at all! The explanation takes longer than the usage.
I’d forgotten Cockney rhyming slang – there are too many examples, and you can easily find webpages full of them. I’ll just note that it was years before I learned that “raspberry” meaning “fart” was a case of Cockney rhyming slang (“raspberry” => “raspberry tart” => “fart”)
In what way does that qualify as a joke? It’s not even a pun or a riddle. At best, it is code. The only time something like that would be funny, would be if Batman and Robin were able to crack it through a series of preposterous guesses.
Like the story about Russell supposedly talking about material implication, or whatever, at a dinner party, and how a false premise implies the truth of any statement, when someone asked him to prove that if 2 + 2 = 5, then he is the Pope. He replied, “If 2 and 2 are 5, by subtraction 1 = 2. The Pope and I are two, therefore we are one. Therefore I am the Pope.”