Shakespeare has two jokes. One is two people looking like each other.
But what is the second?
“Guy walks into a bar…”
Sorry, I’ve never heard anybody say this before. He reused plot devices sometimes, and a missing twin was popular - he used disguises a lot, too - but not two jokes.
are you referring to mistaken identities in the dark, as in MidSummer Night’s Dream or Much ado About Nothing?
I’ve never heard of “Shakespeare’s other joke,” either; but if I had to guess, I’d say that maybe it’s the ‘play-within-a-play’ gag that he seems to get a lot of mileage out of?
Women dressing as men gets the most mileage (even better when the woman has a twin brother to which she looks identical when in disguise! ;))
I just saw Twelfth Night in Ashland a week ago … loved it!
HECK YES you did! Isn’t Robin Nordli (the actor playing Olivia) amazing? She’s one of my favorite actors here. 
Did you see anything else while you were in town?
A traveller weary did enter a local tavern
And brought with him a duck whom he did love
But met he not so great a welcome there
When from behind the bar the good proprietor
Cried “Stop! and bring no turkey fowl in here!”
And laughed the traveller to hear such vain protest,
“Thine eyes deceive or do they fail with age?
Have thou indulged unwise in ale and wine?
For certain any child can know and see
I carry here no turkey but a duck!”
In turn did speak the barman to the tramp
“T’was not to you I spoke, but to the duck!”
I don’t know if you’d call it a joke, but he uses the idea that a man can’t tell one woman from another in the dark (as in Measure for Measure). It was already a venerable theatrical device when Shakespeare was born.
I just read in the New York Times today that the title “Much Ado About Nothing” is a play on “Much Ado About An O Thing”.
“O Thing” apparently referring to female genitalia. Does this make any sense to anyone?
Is that serious? Because it sounds pretty ridiculously post-hoc.
In his will, he leaves his wife his “second-best bed”.
Some might regard that as humor.
I’m certain she didn’t…
Are you talking to me?
That is serious. The article was about curse words in society through the ages. That tidbit jumped out at me as a little bit of a reach.
I was thinking, “I gotta fnd some learned doper’s opinion on that”. Sounds a little like bunk.
I don’t know about “Much Ado about an O Thing”, but a lot of Shakespeare’s jokes are puns, often very vulgar ones:
So, were Ophelia and Hamlet thinking about “an O thing” “between maid’s legs”?
‘country matters’ is the euphemism in the above quote, not some spurious ‘o thing’ explanation.
Also from Hamlet the whole “Get thee to a nunnery” line was also PUNishment; nunnery was slang for a brothel.
Can the OP maybe drop in and say where he heard about this “two jokes” theory? I’ve performed a great deal of Shakespeare, and worked with some pretty well-read and respected people, and I’ve never heard it mentioned before.
Shakespeare had a whole pile of jokes. A lot of them were filthy. Some of them were quite topical at the time, and for some of those the full meaning may never again be known (who was the yoeman of the wardrobe, anyway?). And then there were a number of comical devices, such as the aformentioned play-within-a-play and mistaken identity bits, that he got mileage out of in more than one show.
I can’t see anyone saying that old Will was a two-joke wonder. Not seriously, anyway.
cite. He never does tell us what Shakespeare’s other joke is.
…
You’re actually Dr. John McWhorter, aren’t you?
Shakespeare’s work is saturated with sexual double-entendres. Skimming through a collection of his sonnets, it takes very little time to find poems that are thinly veiled jokes about gay sex, premature ejaculation, having a small penis… and some really nasty stuff, too.