[Warning: may be a bit UK-centric]
Q: Who led the pedants’ revolt?
A: Which Tyler.
Very good. Certainly beats my previous favorite, which never fails to elicit baffled silence from my high school students:
Rene Descartes walks into a bar, orders a beer, and drinks it at a gulp.
“Would you like another?” asks the bartender.
Descartes consideres the question. “I think not,” he says, and disappears.
I love the Pedants’ Revolt joke. Very good.
Credit where credit’s due: I think it was coined by Stephen Fry.
Ok as far as I know Wyet? Tyler lead the peasants revolt in the 15 century… I didn’t get the joke. Am I dumb?
P.S. descartes one is truly good although my cousin thinks it’s too nerdie
The joke works three ways: [list=1]
[li]The leader of the Peasants’ Revolt was Watt Tyler. The first pun is on the similarity of this name to “what”.[/li][li]The pedantry is in changing “what” to “which”.[/li][li]And of course “pedant” sounds like “peasant”.[/li][/list=1]And finally there’s the smug afterglow when one gets it.
A 32-year-old Haitian male walks into a bar.
He presents with ankylosing spodyarthirits and a duck under his arm. He tells the bartender, “My serum alkaline phospatase is elevated with .05 mg/L of meperidine in my plasma and I bet $100 my duck can shit into a shotglass ten feet away.”
The bartender says, “Is this just an ordinary duck who has not been administered a dose of Baclofen or Cyclobenzaprine?”
The Haitian says “Well, lumbar puncture has been performed and revealed gram-negative cocci and decreased leukocytes, but other than that, it’s an ordinary duck.”
“You got a bet if I can perform a rectal biopsy and independent bloodwork.”
“Of course.”
The bartender puts a shotglass on the bar about seven feet away indicating either excessive confidence or a partial loss of visual acuity. The duck passes a reddish, gelatinous-looking stool right onto the bar and nowhere near the shotglass. The bartender laughs and says, “Either you’re the dumbest ankylosing Haitian I ever met or you’re suffering from cerebral hemorrhage.”
The Haitian, without increase in BP, pulls out a hundred dollar bill and says, “I may be a dumb ankylosing Haitian, but I just bet those first-year interns in the corner 500 bucks a piece I could get my duck to shit all over your bar and you’d laugh about it.”
The duck is most likely suffering a deficiency of:
A. Ceftriaxone
B. Erythromycin
C. Methicillin
D. Tetracycline
E. Vancomycin
Granted, the joke itself is old hat; but I’ve always loved the embellishments.
Not nearly in the same caliber as the OP, but my favorite “esoteric” joke:
Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: A fish.
Kills 'em at the “Hello Dali” conventions…
~vert
You smart people are funny!
Here’s mine:
Two dudes walk into a bar, two dudes… No, that’s not it.
And these nuns… No.
Two dudes, there’s these two dudes. Dressed like nuns!
Aw, forget it. That duck sauce joke was true genius.
I pulled off an impromptu pun that no one but I ever seems to get:
I had a co-worker who was a math genius and a lapsed Catholic.
One day she was telling the story of how as a child she always confused the blessing of throats on February 3 (in which unlit candles are touched to the throat) with the blessing of the Easter Candle on Holy Saturday.
I immediately retorted, “Oh? Confusing your Blaise with Pascal?”
A truly sick medical joke.
Q: What’s the difference between Sloan Kettering and Shea Stadium?
A: The mets always win at Sloan Kettering.
In the manner of Pygmaliontwo professors entered into a bet whereby the first professor was to take two prostitutes and give them a classic education. Things went fine at first, the women did well in astronomy, being already acquainted with the night sky, and were familar with Latin due to many encounters with priests. But, to the surprise of both professors, the women enjoyed philosophy most of all, and took to it like ducks to water.
After a few weeks, the second professor went to his friend’s house to concede defeat–the prositutes were even learning Greek! But, when he arrived at his friend’s house, the study where the women had been learning was in shambles, the professor was halfway through his second gin and tonic and the women were gone.
“Dear God, what happened?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” replied his friend. " We had just turned to the study of the early French philosphers, and the women got quite irrational, and then stormed out. What could have gone wrong?"
Wait for it . . . .
“It’s very simple, everyone knows you can’t put Descartes before the whores.”
I don’t know about intellectual, but this one is sophisticated.
A very sophisticated man walks up to a very sophisticated woman at a barstool and says “Want to have sex?”
She says “Your place or mine?”
And he says “If there’s going to be a dicussion about it, then forget the whole thing.”
(Runs in Playboy’s Party Jokes as a classic every couple of years.)
I think the OP confuses being intellectual with rote learning of historical dates and names
That’s not a neutrino in my pocket, I’ve got a hadron.
And the ability to understand them in a humourous context (?).
Thanks for your amusing contribution to this thread.
What did the Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor?
“Make me one with everything.”
Esoteric jokes can be fun… have you heard the one about the programmer whose graphics software stored every line in four bytes or less?
He managed to fit an edge in word-ways.
jjimm that was a hoot. Thanks for starting the thread.
** Kallessa**, loved yours too. Mr Mame, to whom I was reading this thread, has stopped trying to clean the beer out of his keyboard and gone to watch “Buffy”. Apparently it hurts more than coffee when expelled through the nose (that would be the beer, not Buffy!). Try “Feghoot” in Google for similar tales.
Don’t know if my favourite counts as intellectual, but here goes:
Q How do you titillate an ocelot?
A: Oscillate it’s tits a lot.
Now that’s funny.