I’m 47 now. Back when I was a sophomore in high school, we were required to read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.”
It was mildly amusing, but I’ve never been a big Vonnegut fan, and barely thought of the book again for 32 years.
It was only a few days ago that I finally “got” a throwaway joke from that novel. The superweapon Ice Nine had been invented by a mad scientist named Felix Honneker.
“Felix” is the Latin word for “happy.” So, translate the guy’s first name into English, pronounce the full name phonetically, and his name becomes… “Happy Hanukkah.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, not all that funny, but hey- it only took me 32 years to get that joke.
What’s the longest it’s ever taken you to grasp the meaning of a joke?
I’m not sure if this counts, but… you know in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in the bit about the Babel fish, a man “goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed in the next zebra crossing”? When I first heard that as a kid, I had no idea what “zebra crossing” meant in the UK, so I thought the man had been trampled to death by a herd of stampeding zebra.
Last year, when I was doing my master’s, the subject of different types of yogurt came up in class. Apparently there’s the ‘normal’ American style that’s available in every supermarket here, there’s the Greek style, and then there’s the French style, which some company, I forget which, introduced somewhat recently. Someone in the class asked what characteristics defined the French style. It was described as being thick. My friend-- a somewhat conservative guy-- sitting next to me whispered with a straight face, “Huh. I would have expected it to be runny.” I thought he was just making an offhand comment about some aspect of gastronomy that I didn’t really understand, but 3-4 days later, I was thinking back on it and it hit me that it was joke. A really funny one too!
Those stupid Kay Jewelers commercials with the annoying jingle: “Every kiss begins with Kay!” I used to get so mad at how they were saying that every kiss since the beginning of time required Kay diamonds to happen. Yeah, right, cue general fuming at the idiocy. After probably a couple of years of watching the commercial, it dawned on me. Kiss does, in fact, begin with the letter “k”.
Also, years after I first saw it, I was sitting around one day and had an “Oh!” moment, reflecting on Apu’s degree from the Springfield Heights Institute of Technology.
Thanks for asking; I never would have figured it out.
Years ago, when I worked as a cashier, I showed a friend a two-dollar bill I’d gotten in the drawer. He said, “Oh yeah…have you ever seen the hitchhiker on the two-dollar bill?” I said no and he said, “Try and find him!” I tell you I studied that fucking bill for ten minutes. Finally I said, “I give up…where is he?” He took the bill, glanced at it, and said, “Oh! He must have gotten a ride.”
I now do that to anyone who shows me a two-dollar bill.
I had a friend that didn’t get a kid’s Little League (kid’s baseball) ‘joke’ (taunt) until he was almost 40 years old.
In Little League, it was always held in high regard to taunt the other team. Once typical taunt was shouted to the opposing team’s pitcher: “We want a pitcher…not a glass of water”. Well, the play on words, obviously, is that the pitcher is just well, a glass… of water. Pitcher…glass…the glass being much less than a pitcher.
My buddy never got it. He didn’t get it until we were playing Wiffle Ball one day and someone expanded on the taunt and “CLICK” he got it. And he admitted it. We’d have never known.
Not a joke. But the comic book Kill Your Boyfriend was originally published back in 1995 and I read it at the time. It was recently republished and I re-read it. In the book’s epilogue, the protagonist is working in the kitchen and her daughter asks her “Mummy, why are your hands so soft?” Which meant nothing to me in 1995 or when I reread the book earlier this year. But coincidentally I was reading a Wikipedia article this week which mentioned that this phrase is apparently the well-known tagline of a dish soap commercial in the UK.