A Joke A Day A Week, Episode Five

I could talk, & have talked, & will talk a lot about the A Joke A Day jokes which are so monstrously unfunny that you're genuinely surprised when there's an A Joke A Day joke which actually makes you chuckle. But I think it's mainly in the telling - some of these "jokes" actually have a joke in them - they're just so shabbily constructed, it's like listening to a child try to tell a sophisticated story. They miss nuance, they have no sense of timing. It's a rambling mess.

I suspect the reason for this is that the jokes that the A Joke A Day team gets are submitted, vaguely approved (if that), & not in the least edited before the daily submission is shot out to the subscribers. It's amazing to me that there's not one person on the A Joke A Day staff who has enough of a sense of humor - & basic copy editing skills - to spend a thoughtful five minutes cleaning up a joke. As it stands, most of the A Joke A Day jokes come across as the slurring funnies a moderately inebriated person will tell to a crowd of strangers on a dare during an open mic night.

Some of the A Joke A Day jokes are jokes that have been told before (usually better), but this joke, from Sunday, sounds a little familiar, don't you think?

Joe, a college student, was taking a course in ornithology, the study of birds. The night before the biggest test of the semester, Joe spent all night studying. He had the textbook nearly memorized. He knew his class notes backward and forward. Joe was ready.

The morning of the test, Joe entered the auditorium and took a seat in the front row. On the table in the front was a row of ten stuffed birds. Each bird had a sack covering its body, and only the legs were showing. When class started, the professor announced that the students were to identify each bird by looking at its legs and give its common name, species, habitat, mating habits, etc.

Joe looked at each of the birds' legs. They all looked the same to him. He started to get angry. He had stayed up all night studying for this test and now he had to identify birds by their LEGS? The more he thought about the situation, the angrier he got.

Finally he reached his boiling point. He stood up, marched up to the professor's desk, crumpled up his exam paper and threw it on the desk. "What a ridiculous test!" he told the prof. "How could anyone tell the difference between these birds by looking at their legs? This exam is the biggest rip-off I've ever seen!"

With that, Joe turned and stormed toward the exit. The professor was a bit shocked, and it took him a moment to regain his composure. Then, just as Joe was about to walk out the door, the prof shouted out, "Wait a minute, young man, what's your name?"

Joe turned around, pulled up his pant legs and hollered, "You tell me, prof! You tell me!"

If it sounds a little familiar, it's because it's something of a riff on the famous "Do You Know Who I Am?" urban legend. (You can read about it here.) In it, a student outsmarts a professor who doesn't know who he is by sticking his blue book in a stack of them & leaving.

This joke attempts to recreate that urban legend but fails, as the student will. Why? Because the professor can either identify the student by his crumpled-up exam he threw on the desk, or he can simply fail everyone who didn't take the test. The student made the grand gesture for nothing. He would have been better off trying to take the test. Especially if the other students were as confused as he was & he was graded on a curve.

(& by the way, if you'll allow me to overthink a dumb joke, you might have some idea of a bird's species by its size. Also, what a gruesome idea for a test. All those dead birds!)

There was one joke I thought was actually funny this week, so, credit where it's due, I present it here, unedited, as it appeared in my inbox on Tuesday:

There were two guys working for the city. One would dig a hole - he would dig, dig, dig.

The other would come behind him and fill the hole - fill, fill, fill.

These two men worked furiously; one digging a hole, the other filling it up again.

A man was watching from the sidewalk and couldn't believe how hard these men were working, but couldn't understand what they were doing. Finally he had to ask them.

He said to the hole digger, "I appreciate how hard you work, but what are you doing? You dig a hole and your partner comes behind you and fills it up again!"

The hole digger replied, "Oh yeah, must look funny, but the guy who plants the trees is sick today."