maybe you’ll have to reference something beyond middle school chemistry to establish esoteric status. plus it’s also playing a negative “look how stupid these people are” angle rather than “look how smart we are that we get this” angle.
it actually makes me kind of uncomfortable when they run those man-on-the-street interviews where they seek out to embarrass joe sixpack. watching people struggle to find iraq on a map, or women signing “end women’s suffrage” petitions depress me.
2 examples of chem jokes i remembered from school:
a) if you’re not part of the solution, you’re a precipitate.
b) why does a hamburger contain less energy than steak? it’s in the ground state.
some physics jokes:
Why did the chicken cross the road? (pauli exclusion principle) there was already a chicken on this side.
and heisenburg always offers some good ones.
Why are quantum physicists so bad at sex?
Because once they’ve establish position, they’ve lost the momentum. Once they regain the momentum, they’ve gone and lost the position again.
why was heisenburg constantly late to dinner parties?
every time he checked his speedometer he got lost.
Interesting - so does this mean there’s a whole “chain” of Erdos numbers in the baseball world, parallel to that in mathematics? That is, players who co-signed items with Aaron have Erdos numbers of 2, those who co-signed with those folks have numbers of 3, and so on?
I wonder if that chain has diffused into other sports entirely? Or other professions?
There’s a difference between real Erdos numbers and joke ones. Only in jokes does Hank Aaron have an Erdos number. The connection has to be a paper published in a refereed mathematical journal.
I know a lot of Jewish jokes that you’d have to be an Orthodox Jew (or ex-Orthodox, maybe) to get. Does something like this count as esoteric if only .03% of the population will get it?
I’ve never heard the stipulation that it has to be a mathematics journal before, just that it has to be a refereed peer-reviewed journal (so, say, physics journals constitute valid connections). Or possibly a textbook, but baseballs are right out.
How about this? “Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall, aleph-null bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.” The non-esoteric version just uses “infinity” instead of “aleph-null”.
I wasn’t surprised that Danica McKellar has a Erdos-Bacon number, since I knew she had authored a mathematical paper at UCLA, but I was surprised to see Natalie Portman on the list.
I hadn’t heard of the Banach-Tarski paradox before you posted that, but having Wiki’d it I find that joke hilarious.
For a non-tech but extremely esoteric bit of “humor”, I offer:
Ne Miquita pas;
Il faut oublier
Monsieur Vernon Kay,
Mais Steve Jones est là.
L’imbécile crépu,
Il Buzzcocks présente;
La voix discordante
N’est pas entendu;
Ils tous sont allés.
Ils y ont maintenant
Personnes ennuyantes
qui doivent être tuées.
Ne Miquita pas
Ne Miquita pas
Ne Miquita pas
Ne Miquita pas
I’m sure the French is wrong somewhere but I’m also sure that the overlap between the subsets of “people who are familiar with T4 presenters”, “people who are familiar with the works of Jacques Brel” (or, I suppose, Nina Simone) and “people who understand French” is relatively small. Hence: esoteric.
Also, it’s a long way to go for a bad pun, but macaronic puns are a favorite pastime of mine. When I was close to graduating with my degree in music history, the sign on my locker read “Ma fin est mon commencement”.
No it isn’t - it’s a very common literary allusion. Plenty of people who have never read Proust know about madelines and memory. (Frankly, how many people have really read Proust?)
