Before you retort, 'Pah! Of course my humour is not bleedin' intellectual, I have a very down-to-earth sense of humour and like silly jokes,' read these.

Here are some jokes labelled 'intellectual' on the internet:

The best piece of advice that Albert Einstein ever gave me was: 'Never cat-sit for Erwin Schrödinger.'

Rene Descartes is attending a soiree at the Palais Versailles. A sommelier approaches and asks, 'Monsieur Descartes, would you like a glass of wine?' Descartes pauses and answers, 'I think not.' And poof! – he disappears.

Why did the chicken cross the Möbius Strip ?

To get to the same side …

Q: Why does Karl Marx’s toilet play music and squawk when you flush it?

A: Because of the violins and herons in the cistern.

Okay, I will stop copying from the comments in Open Culture's joke column, whose contributors have shared generously. You can read the rest of the jokes over there. Are those jokes 'intellectual'? Well, I suppose so, if what you mean by 'intellectual' is that they require a broad education or a lot of cultural baggage before you get them. And I'll admit it: I get them. If you tell me Justin Bieber jokes, though, I won't get them, because the other day, I had to look up exactly who Justin Bieber was, because I was tired of being ignorant. Now I wish I were ignorant again. But my point is: what you know kind of depends on where you are, what you do, who you talk to, what century it is, etc, etc.

I am as ignorant as the babe unborn about the working parts of motorcycles. Freewayriding, however, is an expert. I wouldn't get the jokes.

This, however, wasn't what I meant by intellectual humour.

Challenging Readers

I think intellectual humour is humour that challenges the reader's thinking. Not in a nasty way, mind you, not necessarily. Just stretches your thought processes for a moment, sort of the way Q used to challenge Picard's thinking. Have you ever seen the television series Saving Grace? I've just started watching it (yeah, yeah, only six years late) and I am amused by what I think of as the intellectual humour of a show about redneck police persons in Oklahoma City. The angel in this story is named Earl and chews tobacco and is played by a genial actor from Rock Hill, South Carolina. He's mind-blowing and makes me laugh, too. I envy his wings, which he wears over grubby jeans and weird t-shirts.

After four episodes, my imagination is already expanding. Thank you, Holly Hunter.

Refusing to Meet Expectations

Q:Why did the surrealist cross the road ?

A:A fish !!

I like that one. It reminds me of a colleague who told me about the course he took in French surrealism. After a semester of this sort of thing, the students showed up for their 'examen final'. The prof pointed wordlessly to a bucket of raw eggs. [For this part, you have to know some French.] Aha!, they realised collectively. Eggs-a-main! (Main='hand'.) They picked up the eggs and threw them at the professor, who was delighted and gave them all As.

The moral of this story is: learn German.

What Does This Have to Do with the Price of Bananas?

I'm not sure. But we need to laugh more. We especially need to laugh more because the world is becoming absurder, and not in a good way. Have you seen the news lately?

We need to laugh, because as Abraham Lincoln said, it's the only thing that will get you through all this. And although Abe said he could 'plough around' Edwin M Stanton [a bossy, humourless guy in his cabinet], I'm not sure even Lincoln could handle this lot of what Keith Olbermann calls 'banana republicans'.

So move the goalposts. Heck, move the whole playing field. Into Kansas. Into next century, if possible. Into the Twilight Zone. Will it work? Dunno. It depends, I suppose, on how 'intellectual' your audience is.

Last Remarks

This one's not in the article. Someone back in the Dark Ages, probably about 1960, was taking a philosophy final. The question was 'Why?' [You were supposed to write, 'Because', to show you knew how Logic worked, duh.] The student wrote, 'Why not?'

Is that a joke?

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

05.12.16 Front Page

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