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Comment by klar120 | Hacker News Reader

This is exclusively the most primitive joke category base on double meanings. The jokes listed are boring and maybe suited for fillers in a standup routine.

Due to the title I presume that this is another pro-"AI" article that devalues human ingenuity. Well, enjoy the non-funny jokes. I'll stick to pre-2022 material.

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The jokes in the article are just there to demonstrate the pattern. There are lots of more sophisticated jokes which clearly follow the same pattern. For example Milton Jones' classic (which won "best joke" at the edinburgh comedy festival I believe)

   I come from a long line of police marksmen. Apart from my grandfather, who was a bank robber.  But he died recently..... surrounded by his family.

More Milton Jones "grandfather" jokes which all clearly demonstrate this pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUfbSrpsHk

I came from a long line of police marksmen. They serve good coffee next to the shooting range.

I came from a long line of police marksmen. We just won the precinct charity cancan dance competition.

the actually funny part is where you decided to create a throwaway account to make the joke

And that they even knew the jokes were bad since their name is "badjoak".

The ten best-voted one-liners from this year's Fringe are listed here:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-s...

A couple follow that pattern exactly, but some also bank on taking words literally for comic effect.

> I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it. (Mark Simmons)

But these are really not that funny. Specifically because you imagine that this is what you get if you bruteforce those combinations. If someone comes up on the spot with this and wants to share, sure it might be funny and clever, but if a professional comedian does jokes likes this, it seems plain and irrelevant. Just something that was bruteforced together.

But this is not truly funny comedy. These seem quite clearly made up and depend on this very specific scenario. I think truly funny jokes are ones that are plausible real life scenarios, that spot some sort of unexpected social circumstance or a phenomena with a clever take or perspective that people do not frequently consider and that many in the audience can relate with. Usually you would expect it to be something that actually happened or could have happened to the comedy teller, and you want to imagine them actually be in that situation. Or it can also be a common real life scenario, but an original, yet clever insightful take on it combined with the character of the teller.

Well as E.B. White put it, explaining a joke is a like disecting a frog. You learn a lot but the thing dies in the process. People do find Milton Jones funny - he won the Perrier "Best Newcomer" Award which is a pretty big deal in UK comedy.

Words with two meanings are just one type of shared aspect in their system. The "hunting cakes" joke was an example of using a shared aspect that isn't a word. (And while it didn't wow me on the page, I think it's the type of joke that a talented comic could make much funnier through their delivery.)

I agree that most of the jokes were weak, but they basically have to use one-liners in order to give many quick examples, and nearly all one-liners I meet are bad. That said, I genuinely enjoyed the "step ladder" one.

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