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Comment by theluketaylor | Hacker News Reader

That's a specific type of expectation confounding that comes from a dangling modifier. English is particularly good at creating these types of sentences and it leads to some of my very favourite jokes.

If the lady had said "Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research" there isn't any ambiguity in the sentence and then no joke.

Community used these to great effect. For example:

Britta: Yep, I’m getting serious. I got a backpack, got a new notebook. Oh, I got one of those see-through yellow pens so I can do that thing where you colour in the words.

Shirley: Highlight?

Britta: Probably the backpack.

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My favourite joke from Community:

I thought you got your degree online from Colombia?

Yes, but they want a real degree from America

Columbia, not Colombia. That's the joke

This one might be the most appropriate since it's a joke about jokes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMT7MAnJna8

My favorite bit is where they keep having the same food every day. It's sort of mentioned in passing here and there throughout the episode but not really foreground material. Then at the end of the episode, it's revealed the dean is learning Excel and accidentally pasted over the entire column with the same value.

Wait, now I'm really curious as to what you think the joke was.

Sorry, wrote my comment in a hurry. I understood the joke the same way everyone else did...

- he told people he got his degree from Col*mbia (both place names are pronounced the same)

- people (naturally) assumed he meant Columbia

- the punchline reveals that it was actually Colombia

- the punchline also hints that he got his degree by buying a certificate online, rather than doing bona fide online learning

Ah OK, I thought you thought they said Colombia initially, and I was wondering if you found something else in it funny.

Interestingly, to me, Colombia and Columbia don't sound the same, but I'm not a native speaker and I tend to think of words in terms of their spelling rather than their pronunciation.

Right. The two being pronounced the same is essential to the joke.

In Spanish they sound different. In English, most people pronounce them both like “Columbia”.

Took me a very long time to get the highlight joke.

Britta thinks Shirley asks for the highlight of the things she got. Shirley thinks she’s telling Britta what that thing that you use to highlight text is called

Hm, is this really a dangling modifier? Something's a dangling modifier when its modificand is unexpressed or ambiguous, but "for cancer research" has a clear modificand, the noun phrase headed by "minutes".

Rather, I think this is just some ambiguity about what the "few minutes" are for.

The joke is that Cancer Research is a UK charity. Sparing a few minutes for them means listening to their pitch, but the author takes it to mean as it being for the lowercase cancer research, hence a few minutes do nothing.

If you had understood the joke in the first place, please unread all the above.

>"Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research"

Sure, I've left my two young kids and a puppy in a locked and closed car and it's a very, very, very hot day and I have 3 important things to do...can you?

/FB cap doff, of course.

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