My wife was on the phone with her daughter the other night, who called to ask if there were any birds that sounded like screaming monkeys. She lives in an older neighborhood with a lot of big trees, and apparently there was quite a ruckus that night. The answer, as it turns out, is the Barred Owl.
While my stepdaughter was describing the noises she heard, she mentioned that a couple of times it sounded like “HOO-wah.”
I piped up “Oh, that’s probably Owl Pacino.”
They were so focused on their conversation that neither of them heard me. I had to repeat it for my wife after she hung up, and she did chuckle a bit. I thought it was damn funny and was disappointed nobody caught it.
The joke is in a superposition of simultaneously being funny and not-funny until someone hears it. You say that your wife ultimately did hear it, at which time the joke-wave function collapsed, and your wife found it to be funny. Until that moment, it remained Schrodinger’s joke.
Title says make a joke, not necessarily say/tell a joke.
So… at work today (I work in food processing) and one of the ingredients is Gouda cheese.
As I was standing there looking at the lot code and use by date I thought, without saying it, I wonder if it turns into Badda cheese after the use by date? I didn’t tell anybody, is it still funny?
The OP title is a variation on the old philosophy 101 question “if a tree falls in the forest but nobody hears it, does it still make a sound?” To which I would say yes it does- it creates sound waves that exist whether anybody or anything hears them or not.
But I think comedy is different— it does not exist alone. Somebody does have to hear it and find it funny for it to be funny. And the originator of the joke doesn’t count: Jokes exist to make other people laugh. So as @Senegoid said, your joke existed in a comedy superposition until it was heard by somebody. Schrodinger’s Joke, indeed.
And I would say yeah, your joke was a live cat joke
My jokes are occasionally hilarious, but always clever. Too clever… I keep most of them to myself.
I’d be really annoying if I didn’t, because I’m constantly observing the world and connecting what I see to something I dredge up from a way-too-wide pool of obscure knowledge.
I don’t mind keeping them to myself, because that’s who I’m entertaining.
So, yes, the Owl Pacino joke would have been funny even if the OP hadn’t told his wife… or his IMHO Support Group.
I’ve been living alone for 17 years now, and I sometimes have the greatest retorts to lines in movies, TV shows or songs, and then I regret that there’s nobody I can tell them, but at least I make myself giggle a bit. It’s a variant of l’esprit de l’escalier, the Treppenwitz (hi, @Treppenwitz).
A corollary would be a joke made with the intended recipient displaced in time. Such as leaving a chalk outline of a body under carpet, to be found by the person who takes up the carpet years later. Is it funny now, or does it have to wait until the punch line is delivered?
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