“Ask not for whom the bell tolls…”
Didn’t see this posted earlier, so I will now:
Okay…since it’s living again…bad, mathy puns…
What’s purple and commutes?
An abelian grape.
What’s yellow and equivalent with the axiom of choice?
Zorn’s Lemon.
What spits and is equivalent with the axiom of choice?
Zorn’s Llama.
During World War II, the Germans were holding several Polish prisoners on a base with an airfield. One of the prisoners managed to make it to the airfield, sight unseen, and got himself into one of the airplanes. He was working on figuring out the controls, when he was dicovered. He surrendered, saying, “I am but a simple Pole in a complex plane.”
mongrel_8 – Amazingly, new evidence concerning the Tells’ bowling was recently discovered on the formerly Swiss Isle of Neumann (yes, Neumann is an island, entire of itself). It seems that owing to the heroic service performed for the country by the great hero Wilhelm (aka William), the Tells were granted free rights to bowl in any alley of the country they so desired.
Therefore never send to know for whom the Tells bowled; they bowled for free …
Now that that’s Donne, here’s some more mathematical ones :
It is true that primitive societies use only rough approximations for the known constants of mathematics. For example, the northern tribes of Alaska consider the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle to be 3. But it is not true that the value of 3 is called Eskimo pi.
[sub]That one was copied from Thirteen Misunderstandings in the History of Mathematics[/sub]
After Noah’s ark finally came to a rest and he opened it up, he released the animals back on to the earth and admonished them, “Go forth and multiply!”
The animals were eager to get out of the cramped boat and quickly spread out. However, a few days later two snakes came back to Noah’s camp with glum expressions on their faces.
“What’s the problem?” asked Noah. “I thought I told you to go forth and multiply!”
“Well, we’d like to, but we can’t, you see,” replied one of the snakes. “We’re adders, and we can’t multiply!”
Noah felt sorry for the couple and took them into his home. Time passed, and he tried to bring them as much comfort as possible. One day, as a gift, he presented them with a wooden table he had made. It wasn’t much, just made from crudely sawn logs, but he hoped they would enjoy it.
A short while later, he saw the Mr. & Mrs. Adder walking around with little snakes of their own! They rushed up when they saw Noah, and said, “Oh thank you so much! You’ve given us a log table, and now we can multiply!”
A few years after the fall of Soviet Communism, there was a tourism boom in the previously closed countries and many airlines began offering service to parts of Eastern Europe. Aside from a few problems with the increased traffic at the airports, everything went well except for flights into Warsaw. It seemed that many planes would arrive fine, but crash just after takeoff from the Warsaw airport. Perplexed as to what could be causing the problem they analyzed the flight paths, plane maintenance, the weather, everything, but no one could figure out just what could be the problem.
Finally a man called the offices of the airline and asked, “I hear you are having problems with your airplanes. I think I can help.” The management of the airline was reluctant to reveal anything to him until he identified himself as a retired engineer who had worked for the Soviet airlines. They decided to give him a shot at the problem, thinking maybe he knew something about the Warsaw airport they had overlooked.
So they invited him to a meeting with their analysts and engineers, and as soon as he arrived they began asking him questions – Was it the runway? the winds? the plane structure, or what? Naturally they were suprised when he asked for, of all things, a list of where all the passengers were seated. Then he asked for a diagram of how the seats were laid out in the aircraft. He looked at the list for a few seconds, then at the diagram, and muttered, “Yes, here’s the problem.”
One of the analysts asked, “What is it? You think the weight of the passengers affected it? But we checked that already.”
“No,” the man replied, “there is nothing wrong with that. But I see here that some of these people on the plane were Polish, and they were sitting on this side --” and here he pointed at the diagram of the airplane, “-- and when you have Poles on the right-hand side of the plane, it’s bound to be unstable.”
From Allan Sherman’s song The Ballad of Harry Lewis (a parody of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”):
I
I’m singing you the ballad of a great man of the cloth
His name is Harry Lewis and he worked for Irving Roth
He died while cutting velvet on a hot July the Foth
His cloth goes shining on!
II
Oh, Harry Lewis perished in the service of his Lord
He was trampling through the warehouse where the Drapes of Roth are stored
He had the finest funeral the union could afford
His cloth goes shining on! 
Another pun from French, from that same textbook:
The book was listing French words which have become incorporated into English, and included the question:
“Are you a conoisseur of fine food?” (Italics in original.)
In my discarded copy of the book I wrote after that question, “No, I always throw it into the sseur.”
We were watching a segment of This Old House and they mentioned the use of granite blocks for something. I commented, “Don’t take me for granite!”
You did that whole thing from memory?!?!?
Sounds a little fishy to me.
If I ever get on the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” show, can I use you as a lifeline?!
I can’t stand those Lassie movies. They’re just soft paw corn.
When I was in the 5th grade, in 1959, the TV series 77 Sunset Strip (snap, snap) was popular. Part of the program’s appeal was the parking-lot attendant “Kookie”, played by Edd Byrnes. Byrnes had a book about Kookie published, with things in it like “Kookie Talk” (“beat your feet,” meaning to run; “beat your teeth,” meaning to talk too much).
One classmate brought the book into class. The teacher saw it, confiscated it and tore it up, saying, “That’s the way the Kookie crumbles.”
Q. What’s green and slimy and has a talk show?
A. Okra Winfrey.
The zombie pun thread has risen again!