From the Wikibooks Jokebook

[pne]

Q: What do you call a middle eastern man in the cockpit of a plane?

A: A pilot.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That reminds me a joke a Swiss friend loved to tell:

F: Was heisst es, wenn ein Neger in den Schnee fällt?
A: Winter!

Er hat das einen "Anti-Witz" gennant.

[pne.livejournal.com]

The page I got that particular joke from was also called "anti-jokes".

My favourite anti-joke, though, is merely absurd:

"Sitzen zwei Kühe auf dem Baum und stricken Hubschrauber. Kommt ein Hund vorbeigeflogen und sagt, Hey, hier dürf ihr nicht Fahrrad fahren. Sagt die Kuh, macht nichts, wir sind Nichtraucher."

Another one, more Zen-style minimal:

"Stehen zwei Grashalme auf der Wiese und gucken sich an."   (yes, that's the entire joke)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

My favourite--well, I don't know if you'd call it an "anti-joke" per se or just one that likewise depends on a mixing levels for its punch, but I'll tell it anyway:

Q: How many lesbian separatists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: That's not funny.

(BTW, I'm still pondering the Grasshalme.)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Meta-jokes can also be funny, I think, as with:

"A rabbi, a priest, and a Buddhist monk are walking along the street and the rabbi says, 'hey, had you heard the one about us?'"

Or takes on existing, well-known jokes, where the humour comes from the fact that the expected punchline isn't there:

"Why was six afraid of seven?
It wasn't. Numbers are not sentient and thus incapable of feeling fear."

(Though I feel that this particular example is a bit lacking, but merely the fact that the punchline is not "Because seven ate nine" catches you off-guard.)

Or that otherwise take jokes literally when you expect this not to be the case:

"What do you get when you cross a chicken with a centipede?
A media circus about the debate over the morals and ethics of genetic engineering."

I also kind of appreciated the "worm in apple" joke (the original version of which is also one of my favourites), though I doubt I'd tell it to others.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

SomethingAwful had an anti-joke contest a bit ago. My favorite one from that (paraphrased):

A horse walks into a bar. The barkeep says, "Why the long face?" The horse says, "I am pondering the ramifications of my sentient nature, and the extent of my legal protections."

[pne.livejournal.com]

I also like this one:

Two muffins are sitting in an oven, baking.
One muffin says to the other, "Wow, it's getting pretty hot in here."
The other replies, "Aaaaaah holy ****, a talking muffin!"

[n-true.livejournal.com]

LOL :)

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

Found the link (http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2792) to the SA article I mentioned.

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

Sitzen zwei Kühe auf dem Baum und stricken Hubschrauber.

That alone made me grin.

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

What does "Neger" mean? I got as far as "What's it called when a __ falls in the snow?" but I'm not even sure that's correct. =P

[pne.livejournal.com]

I got as far as "What's it called when a __ falls in the snow?" but I'm not even sure that's correct. =P

It is. (And the punchline is "Winter", as is probably obvious.)

"Neger" means "negro", i.e. person of dark skin colour. Not the most PC term, but I'd say not actually offensive. (I'm not sure of the status of "negro" in the US; it's likely that the German word is more acceptable, though.)

The joke being that the "expected" punchline is, presumably, something based on black and white being mixed, e.g. an Oreo or whatever.

Hm, on reviewing the joke, it should be "Wie heißt es, wenn..." rather than "Was heißt es, wenn...". "What's it called" is "Wie heißt es" (literally, "How's it called"), while I'd interpret "Was heißt es" as "What does it mean/what is the significance of".

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

Aha! That was actually my first guess, but I was thinking of "fall" in the wrong way -- as in, falling among the snow, rather than tripping and falling.

Re: Negro, I'm not sure I'd call it exactly offensive (not as much so as other possibilities, anyway), but it sounds old-fashioned and somewhat backwards.

Genitiv ins Wasser, denn es ist Dativ!

[pne.livejournal.com]

That was actually my first guess, but I was thinking of "fall" in the wrong way -- as in, falling among the snow, rather than tripping and falling.

Oh! Right.

The German uses the accusative here ("...in den Schnee..."), which indicates motion, so a better translation would perhaps be "falls into the snow".

The "falling among" interpretation of "in the snow" would use the dative ("...im Schnee..." < "...in dem Schnee").

It's correct

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

LEO (http://dict.leo.org/) is your friend!

[leora.livejournal.com]

A man gets sent to jail. On his first day there, at lunch, he finds that the inmates shout out numbers and then they all laugh. He's very confused by this and asks one of the other men what's up with that? The man explains, well, we only have one jokebook and we've all read it so many times that we know all the jokes. So, we just say the number for the joke.

He ponders this. The next day at lunch, he hears people shouting out numbers and laughing. 14! 29! 3! And he decides to try it. So he shouts out 23! and suddenly the room goes quiet.

He whispers to the man sitting next to him, "What's wrong? What'd I do wrong?" And the man says, "That's not funny. That's this joke."

[tungol.livejournal.com]

Hah! The way I've heard that one, the punch line goes like this: "Well, you know, some people just can't tell a joke."

[pne.livejournal.com]

I heard that one, too.

And a variation: new guy shouts out a number, people laugh especially hard and clap him on the back, guy next to him says "Thanks; we hadn't heard that one before!".

[leora.livejournal.com]

The way I originally heard it had the punchline: Yeah, but you're not telling it right.

But I had anticipated my punchline and liked mine better, so I use it.

I think I've heard pne's variation too though.

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

I heard it like that, but as "Your delivery is off." Funny, I heard it for the first time on the day this entry was posted -- but I was out of the country so I just now saw the entry!