From the Wikibooks Jokebook

[pne]

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

A: A pilot.

Comments

[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!