Your sister is pretty well right, I think – I gather that in sailing-type circles, to “make something fast” to something else, meant to tie it with string or rope.
[QUOTE]
My mother:
Three animals walk into a bar. While they’re there drinking, it starts to rain. The turtle volunteers to go get their umbrellas (He’s got a shell, so he won’t get wet).“Just don’t drink my beer,” he says.
The turtle is gone one hour. Two hours. Three hours.
Finally, the remaining two animals talk it over and decide that he’s not coming back – they may as well drink his beer.
At which point the turtle opens the bar door and says: “If you drink my beer, I won’t go for the umbrellas”
That’s the punch line. Really. {End quote}
I find this, a rather good one – emphasising the extreme slowness of “the creature with a shell” – in three hours, he’s got only as far as the bar door. (In Britain, we’d call the slow hero a tortoise rather than a turtle – but I gather the two words are more interchangeable in America.)
Your sister is pretty well right, I think – I gather that in sailing-type circles, to “make something fast” to something else, meant to tie it with string or rope.
If that’s your idea of “a rather good one”, I don’t want to hear any of your favorite jokes.
And if you think that the wordplay of “tie something fast” works with “How do you make a slow horse fast”, I really don’t want to hear your jokes.
I heard it as “if you were flying over a lake in a canoe and one of the wheels fell off, how many pancakes would it take to shingle a doghouse?” My mother told it to me.
My worst is the shaggy dog story about the train conductor who commits murder and they try over and over to electrocute him, and it doesn’t work because he was a bad conductor.
The phrase is not “tie something fast” but, rather, “make something fast”. Perhaps part of the wordplay is mixing nautical terminology with landlubbing activities (equitation).
While neither are superbly funny jokes, I find them amusing, particularly for kids. One reason to tell jokes to kids is to show humor has many facets, and these do that. I am somewhat surprised it has taken so long for you to “get” the punchlines for them.
What makes you think it took me a long time to “get” the second one?
For the first, I think all you guys are wrong about it being “Tie the horse fast”. BY my lights, you’re all misinterpreting the joke, and still haven’t gotten it.
Since we’re talking real pain here and not “bad but kinda funny” then I’ll tell you about what your bumper sticker reminds me of:
“Cooking with Poo”
That’s the title of a real cookbook, by a nice, presumably Thai woman named Poo. I’m sure it’s a fine book, and she looks like a darling, smiling on the front cover of the book. But the title…gawd.
I feel like Donna Douglas in that classic Twilight Zone episode. Only, after they take the bandages off, instead of finding myself in a world full of people with pig-like faces, I’m in a world full of people who like the Turtle Joke. And I run down the hallways screaming.
If you really think this needs further discussion…
I use the word “get” in reference to a joke to mean understand the humor of. In post #60, after the second joke, you wrote
Which suggests, to me at least, that you felt the need to point that out. Perhaps you felt others might not make the connection because you did not see it, at first. Perhaps you meant something else. I guess from your reaction that you do understand the humor and perhaps you were pointing out the punch line like that as a sarcastic way of showing that you understand, but do not appreciate, the humor.
As far as the first one goes, you might want to look in a dictionary for the word fast. The number 1 definition for fast
Tying is one way to make an object fast. Now, there are other definitions of the word, and this meaning man not be the one your relatives meant when they told you the joke as a kid, but it is a widely recognized definition of the word and it makes the joke “work”.
There’s a shaggy-dog story I’ve used to torture people. The goal is to see how long you can go before they stop you.
There’s a little cornflake who lives at the bottom of a cornflake box and wants more than anything to live at the top of the cornflake box. So the little cornflake works and works and climbs to the top, but the big bully cornflakes at the top say “you don’t belong here!” and push the poor little cornflake back to the bottom. After crying, the cornflake gets an idea, and gets a rope and climbing gear and starts to climb, climb… but the cornflakes at the top push the little cornflake back down again. After crying, the cornflake gets an idea…
At this point, the joke-teller starts to come up with more and more complicated ways that the little cornflake tries to get to the top, always to fail and be pushed back down. Think Wile E. Coyote here - just more and more complicated schemes with crazy gear just to get to the top, only to be pushed back by the bully cornflakes.
At some point, (45 min is my record) the audience is getting restless. And more restless. Eventually, the car ride is coming to an end or something, and someone says “is it almost over?!?” or “end the joke already!” or something like that. At which point, you say:
Your suppositions about my ability to understand the second joke are completely off the mark. If I point out that this is the punchline, I am emphasizing the last of the joke’s funniness, not my slowness in comprehending it.
As for the first, I don’t need to look in the dictionary. I know that meaning of “fast”. I knew it when I was a kid, and my sister first told me that. The problem is that it doesn’t, in my mind “work” at all as a joke.
“How do you make a slow horse fast”
“Tie it to a post”
No, just because I can make the construction “tie it fast” doesn’t make that a joke. You wouldn’t ordinarily do it. The construction that tying the horse to a post so it can’t eat makes it “fast” follows better both logically and grammatically. The idea that you can tie something “fast” does not. At all.
As a clown and a little boy are walking into the woods the boy turns to the clown and says “I’m scared!”
“You’re scared?”, the clown replies, “I have to walk back out alone!”
