@ 4:00
I’m not really sure, but it seems to me that it’s either the unlikeliness of having such a time-consuming suit being ready in just a couple of days or that the store owner is lying about how it’s made.
I thought it might have some Jewish humor aspect that I was missing.
It’s a shaggy dog story, just like Larry Miller’s story, and like the Aristocrats. The joke is that the payoff isn’t worth the windup.
Well, I thought it was funny, but an explanation is a little tough.
I don’t think there’s a single definitive answer for the question of how the suit could be ready by Saturday. The tailor isn’t necessarily lying about how the suit is made, and he isn’t necessarily going to try to foist a different suit off on the customer…
The humor is that despite all other factors the tailor isn’t going lose a $10,000 sale and all the theoretical difficulties --played up for 45 seconds-- are tossed aside in an instant for that bottomline truth.
The mystery of how he’s going to provide the guy with the suit is unexplained and just makes the humor a bit more tart.
I chuckled the first time I heard it. I didn’t find it as funny as the Larry Miller joke. It’s when he mentions the bar mitzvah that he gives a kind of “why didn’t you say so” answer. That’s what threw me off. Thanks for the answers.
I think it maybe kinda does. It’s probably mostly about the absurdity, but it reminds me quite a bit of some of the stories (not jokes) a couple of self-identified "New York Jew"s have told me about how they ran their businesses.
The gist or lesson of those stories is that you go ahead and make the deal, and worry about the details of actually getting it accomplished later. That joke just takes the idea to an absurd level.
I may be presuming too much based on too little data, but my hypothesis is that the joke is cromulent within a subset of Jewish culture.
This was what I took from it.
Yeah, that’s sort of what I got from it…all this set-up explaining how difficult, etc., and then a handwaving “Don’t worry, you’ll have it” by this weekend. It’s a salesman who will tell you whatever you need to hear, no matter how absurd or contradictory, to get you to buy a $10,000 suit.