Would getting the Batman joke require being old enough to remember 60s TV show theme songs?
(quoting is fubbed again)
I got #6… I meant #5, the Batman joke.
Theme song? Theme song? Hum a few bars and let’s see if I can fake it… :rolleyes:
Yes, and knowing that:
the symbol for sodium is NA.
Halitosis is bad breath. You could have looked that up in a dictionary.
I like this one, I’m going to tell it to my math nerd mother. Partly because she’ll think it’s funny, and I don’t know if anyone else I know would get it.
Actually 2. The point is you can pick a number smaller than 2, but the limit can be easily shown to exceed any such number provided you are willing to take enough terms in your series; hence, the smallest number that it cannot exceed is 2, which is therefore defined as the limit of the infinite series. So the bartender’s remark indicates that he knows this.
You didn’t answer question 2. Rorschach “ink blots” do not depict anything - so if you see a picture of your parents fighting, that’s come out of your own psyche, and if you’re seeing lots of them, you must have some psychological issues.
I don’t get #11, the one about the 3 logicians
In order:
1.) It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs… because they always take things literally.
Kleptomaniacs literally take things.
2.) Who is this Rorschach guy? … and why does he paint so many pictures of my parents fighting?
Rorschach was the developer of the ink-blot test.
3.) 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!”
‘Martini’ is the plural of the name ‘Martinus’ (or, generally, the -i ending marks, among other things, plurals in certain declensions).
4.) René Descartes walks into a bar. Bartender asks if he wants anything. … René says, “I think not,” then disappears.
Descartes made the famous statement, “I think, therefore I am.”
5.) Sixteen sodium atoms walk into a bar… followed by Batman.
The symbol for sodium is Na.
6.) Yo momma’s so classless… she could be a Marxist utopia.
Marxism envisions a classless (in the economic sense) society.
7.) Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero?… He’s 0K now.
Absolute zero is, by definition, 0 Kelvin.
8.) An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders a beer, the second orders half a beer, the third orders a quarter of a beer, and so on. … After the seventh order, the bartender pours two beers and says, “You fellas ought to know your limits.”
The limit of the sequence (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + … + 1/2^n) is 2 as n o\infty.
9.) Pavlov is sitting at a bar, when all of the sudden the phone rings… Pavlov gasps, “Oh crap, I forgot to feed the dogs.”
Pavlov had a famous experiment getting dogs to associate food, and thus salivate, when a bell was rung.
10.) Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and, with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath…. This made him a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
The song from Mary Poppins.
11.) Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “Do all of you want a drink?”… The first logician says, “I don’t know.” The second logician says, “I don’t know.” The third logician says, “Yes!”
Take the bartender’s question literally. If the first two logicians had not a wanted a drink, they would have said no; there exists a logician who does not want a drink. Hence the first two did want drinks, and the third logician was able to reply definitively.
12.) How can you tell the difference between a chemist and a plumber? … Ask them to pronounce “unionized.”
Un-ionized versus union-ized.
13.) What’s the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist?… An etymologist knows the difference.
Etymologists study word origins; entomologists study insects.
14.) The other day my friend was telling me that I didn’t understand what irony meant. … Which is ironic, because we were standing at a bus stop.
Such a situation is, in fact, not ironic.
15.) There are two types of people in this world:… Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
The data presented in the joke are also incomplete.
16.) An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. … But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.” A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
‘Yeah’ and ‘right’ are both positives, but combined they form a sarcastic negative. (And no linguistics professor would say that double negatives form positives in English.)
17.) A photon checks into a hotel and the bellhop asks him if he has any luggage…. The photon replies, “No, I’m traveling light.”
Light is made up of photons, and light rays are movign photons.
18.) Your momma is so mean… she has no standard deviation.
A random variable has zero standard deviation iff it’s constant and thus exactly equal to its mean (well, almost surely).
19.) I’m thinking about selling my theremin… I haven’t touched it in years.
As you would have found by Googling it, a theremin is a musical instrument played without touching it.
20.) What does the “B” in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for?… Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
Mandelbrot was a mathematician working on fractals.
21.) What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question? … …
Do you even know what a rhetorical question is?
The first one wants a drink, but he does not know whether the other two do, so he answers “Don’t know” to the question “Do you all want a drink”.
The second one also wants a drink, and he now knows the first does too (otherwise the first could have answered “No [we don’t all want one]”, but he still does not know about the third, so he also says “Don’t know.”
The third now knows that both the other two do want a drink (or else at least one of them could have answered “No”). As he wants one too, he knows they all do, so he answers “Yes”.
I am still not getting #14 (irony), though.
NOW I get it! That’s funny!
Merged duplicate threads.
My sister used to have a cartoon with a picture of the Batmobile racing off to save the day, captioned “Datadatadatadatadatadatadatadata…”. She said it was to inspire her to diligently collect data, as a good lab tech should. 
Since then, I do the song in my head as “Dadadadadada…”, rather than “Nanananana…”.
#14 - could it be they were standing (still, unmoving) at a bus stop?
No, it is simpler than that.
The exact text is, “The other day my friend was telling me that I didn’t understand what irony meant. … Which is ironic, because we were standing at a bus stop.”
There is nothing ironic about simply being at a bus stop which means the friend is correct. The person really doesn’t have any idea of what irony is after all (which is actually somewhat ironic on its own). It is one of those “meta” jokes.
The question is whether all three logicians want a drink.
If the first one didn’t, he could answer “no.” In this case he does want a drink but doesn’t know whether the other two do, so he has to answer “I don’t know.”
Similar logic applies to the second. He wants a drink and knows the first logician wants a drink, but doesn’t know whether the third logician wants one, so has to answer “I don’t know.”
The third logician deduces that because the first two answered “I don’t know” then they both must want a drink. Since he also wants a drink he can confirm that all three want a drink, so answers “yes.”
ETA: Oops, missed that njtt already addressed this. Sorry folks.
It’s also a great T-shirt, too.
(Some I work with has it.)
I prefer the XKCD version
MyFootsZZZ, is American English your primary language? From some of the ones you didn’t get, I wonder.
XKCD also did a variation on #5
Dammit! I do hate meta-humor.