Day: September 23, 2005

The Friday Random 10, “Hell if I Know” edition:

Darling Be Home Soon – the Lovin’ Spoonful
Crazy Baby – Joan Osborne
Law (Earthlings On Fire) – David Bowie
Six String Music – Jimmy Buffett
In the Waiting Line – Zero 7
For Your Love – the Yardbirds
Shove This Jay-Oh-Bee – Canibus With Biz Markie
Taxman – the Beatles
Shibuya – Brian Reitzell & Roger J. Manning Jr.
Tennessee Jed – Grateful Dead

I never imagined I’d have reason to say this, but: my cup runneth over with math jokes.

It started this morning when my boss handed me a hard copy of this (note, free AMS user id and password required). It’s an article by Paul Renteln and Alan Dundes entitled “Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor,” and it contains such gems as:

Q: What’s purple and commutes?
A: An abelian grape.

and

Q: What do you call a young eigensheep?
A: A lamb, duh!

These are jokes that I’m sure are a laugh riot in the right circles. In fact, I help to publish books in those circles, being an editorial assistant for a couple of acquisitions editors, one in maths and stats. But, as an English major who hasn’t actually taken a math class since my senior year of high school*, these jokes go largely over my head.

But anyway, no sooner had I started looking at that article then Generik sent me another math joke. Well, okay, a dumb-blonde joke, but there was some math content involved. (And for those of you offended by dumb-blonde jokes, Renteln and Dundes offer at least one math joke where the tables are turned.)

Anyway, now that I think about it, I realize that that’s really not a lot of math jokes. Hardly enough for a cup to start runnething over or anything. In theory, I do deal with mathematics — or at least mathematicians — most every day.

But Renteln and Dundes’ basic premise did get me thinking. They write:

…[M]athematicians as a group share a common core of mathematical folklore. Some of this folklore tends to be quite esoteric and intelligible only to members of the group. Outsiders not possessing the requisite mathematical vocabulary and knowledge rarely know such esoteric material, and even if they did they would probably not understand it. But there is also exoteric mathematical folklore that is known to a limited number of outsiders, for example, physicists, chemists, and engineers. Much of this exoteric folklore consists of classic jokes contrasting members of different but related academic disciplines.

What it got me thinking of was one of my favorite writer jokes. Not that that’s tough to understand if you’re not a writer or anything, but there are jokes like that. (More so, I suspect for English majors, copyeditors, editorial assistants, and the like.)

So the question is: are there jokes you find funny but that you probably couldn’t explain why, that rely on your own exoteric folklores?

* This is not entirely true. I did take an astronomy course in my senior year of college where some very basic math was required. And there’s always that Formal Logic class I took freshman year…but I squeaked by with a low D in that, so the less said about it, maybe, the better.

Things that amuse me: finding the word “quality” misspelled in the phrase “quality control.”

But, then again, it also amuses me that one of the actors in NBC’s new deep-sea-monster show, Surface (which I’m not watching), is named Lake. So, clearly, I am easily amused.