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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

So old that it's weird that the author would seemingly self-attribute it.

To add supporting evidence, here's something from 41 years ago where the butt of the joke was the leadership of Soviet Russia, and the inheritance was 2 letters:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/01/15/a...

A couple years ago I went looking for soviet jokes. They're amazing. I imagine google can find you some.

A bunch of them were great. One I recall,

American: The U.S. is the best! I can stand in front of the Whitehouse and yell, Ronald Regan is the worst president ever!

Soviet: Comrade, I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell the same thing!

There's a bunch, with varying levels of grim. If you're ever bored, it's a rabbit hole that's worth poking around in.

That was then. In 2023, in the USA, try standing in front of your local police department and explaining the simple, statistically likely, fact that they have at least one sexual predator working there. They will physically abuse you until you leave. If you refuse to leave, they will send you for a mental evaluation. If you still resist, they will kill you.

Even more reason to look them up.

Soviet standing in red square handing out blank pieces of paper.

Police come, and tell him to stop distributing protest flyers.

Protestors: Protest? they're blank paper!

Police: Comrade, everyone knows what's wrong.

I might have messed it up a little, but, you get the gist.

Humor imitates life:

Russia arrested anti-war protesters holding blank signs: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-protest...

But apparently this a thing in many countries, and there's even a Wikipedia article about this form of protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_piece_of_paper

Ah, to be in America:

>In 1970, Anna Halprin organised a "Blank Placard Dance" by members of her San Francisco Dancers' Workshop. They paraded, dressed in white, while holding blank placards. She explained, "...there were so many protests going on and this way each person watching us could just imagine whatever protest slogan they wanted on the placards."

It's nice to be able to protest with blank signs because you want to make a joke, and not because of fear of arrest.

They should arrest you for misuse of statistics.

Since this is a joke thread, I'll share one related to this concept:

The police catch a man trying to sneak a bomb onto a plane, and question him.

Man: I was doing it to increase the flight's safety!

Police: How can a bomb make a flight safer?

Man: Obviously I'm not going to set mine off, and what are the chances that there are two bombs on the same flight??

They told this joke about A. Mikoyan who survived all Stalin's purges which made him the oldest living member of the Politburo at that time:

- Comrade Mikoyan, you forgot your umbrella!

- Don't worry, I'll walk between the raindrops.

That makes me think of children's book I saw once, The Rabbi and the 29 Witches. The titular Rabbi convinces them that he arrived dry because he danced between the raindrops.

Funny, I remember this specific joke from my childhood.

My dad would bring home photocopied jokes or cartoons from work. It's funny to imagine someone making 50 copies of one of these, then passing them out around their workplaces laughing with their co-workers.

15 years later you saw the same stuff in email, fwd: FWD: FWD: Re: Why American is great

My personal favorite:

A man yells in the street: "Nicholas is a moron!". He is taken away by the police on charges of lese majeste (insulting the monarch). He tells the policemen "Please let me go, I meant another Nicholas!". The police chief replies: "Do not lie. If you said 'moron', you certainly meant the Tsar!"

Comrade 1: What are one potato say other potato?

Comrade 2: Premise ridiculous! Who have two potato?

This got me laughing - and I reckon it's because of the extremely high laughter-to-length ratio.

Has anyone formally evaluated joke effectiveness (apart from Monty Python's "deadly joke")?

I can't believe this is still up, but it's amazing: Russian lolcats.

https://rolcats.wordpress.com/

This is the most wonderful thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. Thank you.

I guess it's hard to be a "NY Times bestselling author and keynote speaker" when you have to come up with all original ideas.

Anyone who publishes a book with a marketing budget is a NYT bestseller. It means nothing.

Being able to get your book published and having the publisher spend enough on marketing to get you on the NYT Bestseller list means something.

What does it mean? Rich parents?

It means a publisher ranked possibility of a positive return on investment for that book to be higher than the books they decided not to publish.

There are plenty of techniques to reach the NYT bestseller list; new internet matketers pay famous internet marketers to tell their followers to quickly buy their new book, hopefully in many copies, often with the cost fully or largely refunded.

The book is usually about how to reach the NYT bestseller list.

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