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Inferring the wrong punchline from the joke

Started by Stoneage Dinosaurs, April 16, 2018, 06:28:37 PM

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Stoneage Dinosaurs

Not a case of just straight up not getting a joke, but a case of thinking you've got the joke and laughing at it, but later realising the punchline to that joke is actually something completely different.

This is the example that made me think of this. From the Blue Rat episode of 15 Storeys High:

QuoteVince: What are you doing up?

Errol: Got a job interview.

Vince: At 3 o' clock in the morning?

Errol: It's at Billingsgate fish market. Got there yesterday at 8 and they said "What time do you call this?"

Now as there's a running joke about the fishmongers playing pranks on Errol ("COME CLEAN YOUR HANDS ON ME COAT"), I thought that was just them tricking him into coming in ridiculously early for a laugh. It was only today that I learned that Billingsgate market's actual opening hours are 4-8:30 AM.

Anyone else?

Embarrassing example, but there's an 8 Mile pastiche scene in Scary Movie 3 where the protagonist throws up his hood after winning a rap battle, the hood turns out to be big & pointy and he gets chased off. Young myself didn't know about the Klan, and thought the character was in deep trouble for being stylistically wack.

mjwilson

For many years, I thought that, in the joke "How do you get down from a camel? You don't, you get down from a duck!", that the idea was that you avoided sitting on a camel in the first place and sat on a duck instead, thereby making it easier to dismount.

zomgmouse

Ooh this happens to me and often results in me thinking that what the punchline I thought it was going to be would actually be a lot better than what it actually ended up being and then I feel sad.

Ron Superior

The whole Furry Honeypot Adventure bit in Bottom.

As a kid I always thought the joke was that a film with such an innocent sounding name could never have been a porno.

When I actually worked out what the actual joke was, well, I was a bit disappointed and preferred my original understanding.

East of Eden

Quote from: mjwilson on April 16, 2018, 08:40:25 PM
For many years, I thought that, in the joke "How do you get down from a camel? You don't, you get down from a duck!", that the idea was that you avoided sitting on a camel in the first place and sat on a duck instead, thereby making it easier to dismount.

Is the joke that you physically get down when you duck, as in to crouch down? Cos that's fucking awful.

Oops! Wrong Planet

Quote from: East of Eden on April 17, 2018, 01:09:03 AM
Is the joke that you physically get down when you duck, as in to crouch down? Cos that's fucking awful.

I can't believe you don't know what the actual joke is.


























































It's a reference to Disco Duck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWhozyOoZQ , which you can't listen to without getting down.

East of Eden

Amazing that that's not the worst thing to have happened on Top of the Pops.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: East of Eden on April 17, 2018, 01:09:03 AM
Is the joke that you physically get down when you duck, as in to crouch down? Cos that's fucking awful.

It's a very basic, silly bit of wordplay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_feather

I can't believe that this has to be explained on a comedy-savvy website, it's like explaining a "Why does the chicken cross the road?" joke.


Oops! Wrong Planet

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on April 17, 2018, 02:01:23 AM
It's a very basic, silly bit of wordplay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_feather

I can't believe that this has to be explained on a comedy-savvy website, it's like explaining a "Why does the chicken cross the road?" joke.

I just presumed East of Eden was joking.

And why shouldn't the chicken cross the road?  Nazi.

East of Eden

You give me too much credit O!WP, but its a shit joke, that has now tripped up two cabbers.

It would get the local bird watching club guffawing and twizzling their moustaches, but not me like.

Always thought the "why does the chicken cross the road?" joke is an underrated bit of anti-comedy by the by.

Oops! Wrong Planet

Quote from: East of Eden on April 17, 2018, 02:29:22 AM
Always thought the "why does the chicken cross the road?" joke is an underrated bit of anti-comedy by the by.

Which came first, the chicken or the turkey?

bobloblaw

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on April 17, 2018, 02:01:23 AM
It's a very basic, silly bit of wordplay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_feather

I can't believe that this has to be explained on a comedy-savvy website, it's like explaining a "Why does the chicken cross the road?" joke.

... the actual meaning of which was only explained to me in my late '30s.

gilbertharding

There was a Mel and Griff face to face bit where Mel said, "Of course, John Lennon wasn't just a man... he was a symbol." Griff replied, "That will have been handy for Ringo."

I thought for ages that was a joke about Ringo being illiterate, rather than just a pun on 'cymbal'.

Utter Shit

Quote from: East of Eden on April 17, 2018, 02:29:22 AM

Always thought the "why does the chicken cross the road?" joke is an underrated bit of anti-comedy by the by.

I always thought the point of the joke was that the punchline was so mundane, anti-comedy like you said, but I saw something online recently which (mis?)interpreted it as a 'proper' joke based on wordplay - "to get to the other side" meaning "to die". Now I don't know what to think.

Thosworth

"You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"Ask a glass of water."

I always thought it meant a glass of water would only see a person who was experiencing a hangover.

It took over 30 years to get the actual joke.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Do you only drink water when you're hungover?

Thosworth

Well it was more "Ask a glass of water what a drunk person looks like". But yes, it just seemed like a really awkward observation.

big egg

As a young and naive kid I inexplicably thought the "I'm sorry I've just come" sketch in the Fast Show was basically people declaring "I've just arrived" when they hadn't. And I really found it funny.

Utter Shit

Not a joke as such, but I always used to mishear the ending theme of Fools and Horses  as "where it all comes from is Mr. Reeve", assuming Mr. Reeve was some unseen controller of the Peckham underworld who Del gets his gear from.

Jumblegraws

Quote from: East of Eden on April 17, 2018, 02:29:22 AM
You give me too much credit O!WP, but its a shit joke, that has now tripped up two cabbers.

It would get the local bird watching club guffawing and twizzling their moustaches, but not me like.

Always thought the "why does the chicken cross the road?" joke is an underrated bit of anti-comedy by the by.

The "duck down" joke I always heard as a kid was "What grows up as well as down? A duck" - that phrasing nudges people towards the correct interpretation, imo.

In your defence, "down" in the sense of feathers isn't a usage you hear often. During a creative writing elective I did in my final year of high school, I told a couple of my friends my own variation on the joke: "why are duck farmers so much fun? Cos they know how to get down". When my friends were blank-faced, the teacher - an English teacher, mind you - volunteered the explanation that it was a play on the verb "duck", at which point I jumped in to set the whole lot of thickos straight.

Back on-topic, in Toy Story they sneak in a relatively off-colour joke during the toys' "staff meeting" near the beginning of the film. When the toys refuse to react calmly to Woody's announcement of the impending birthday party, Slinky jumps in to stick up for him. Mr Potato Head smirks at this, detaches his mouth and starts motioning it at his own arse, making kissing noises. Now although I've basically explained the joke just by describing it, as a child I didn't really catch on to the kissing noises and thought Mr PH was miming the even more crude idiom "talking out his ass".

Jumblegraws

I've also experienced the inverse of this phenomenon. The St Andrews Uni library had a copy of a Roy "Chubby" Brown DVD (fucked if I can remember what one). Comedy snobs that they are, my friends thought this was so funny that they decided to rent it. In it, Chubby tells the following joke: "Have you heard that Charlotte Church is smoking [a lot of] cigarettes a day? I thought there was no smoking in Church?!?" - so the joke is that it's a play on Church the name/church the place of worship, but the wording is so clumsy and the overall intent of the joke so poor that I swore I must be misinterpreting it and it wasn't until I canvassed everyone in the room and then several more people over the following week that i accepted that a professional stand-up with decades of experience would tell such a shit gag. I mean, it just doesn't scan at all, you don't smoke in yourself. It sounds like the sort of joke a very young child devises when they haven't quite got the hang of wordplay and the like.

To this day I'm still not certain I wasn't missing something.

Stoneage Dinosaurs

I think I've posted this before on CaB, but also, someone told me that the Beatles album "Rubber Soul" was a pun. It was quite late that I realised it was based on "rubber sole" (or "plastic soul"), having previously thought the clean cut fab four had subversively named their album as a play on "rub arsehole"

Jumblegraws

#23
Quote from: Angrew Lloyg Wegger on April 17, 2018, 07:11:31 PM
I think I've posted this before on CaB, but also, someone told me that the Beatles album "Rubber Soul" was a pun. It was quite late that I realised it was based on "rubber sole" (or "plastic soul"), having previously thought the clean cut fab four had subversively named their album as a play on "rub arsehole"

I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone on their inner-circle confessed that they intentionally used a pun that does double-duty as an innocent bit of wordplay and the more vulgar double-entendre you interpreted. If that is the case, it went over my head all this time.

Crabwalk

The first time I watched the episode of 'I'm Alan Partridge' where Alan says to Jill:

'Ooh Jill, you're so dirty! It's quite refreshing. You call a spade a spade. Actually, you'd probably call it a big tool'

I winced, as I thought Alan was using a racist term and associating it with large penises.

I realised I'd jumped to the wrong conclusion upon second viewing, and felt a bit ashamed that my mind went there.

RenegadeScrew

Quote from: Jumblegraws on April 17, 2018, 06:30:35 PM
I've also experienced the inverse of this phenomenon. The St Andrews Uni library had a copy of a Roy "Chubby" Brown DVD (fucked if I can remember what one). Comedy snobs that they are, my friends thought this was so funny that they decided to rent it. In it, Chubby tells the following joke: "Have you heard that Charlotte Church is smoking [a lot of] cigarettes a day? I thought there was no smoking in Church?!?" - so the joke is that it's a play on Church the name/church the place of worship, but the wording is so clumsy and the overall intent of the joke so poor that I swore I must be misinterpreting it and it wasn't until I canvassed everyone in the room and then several more people over the following week that i accepted that a professional stand-up with decades of experience would tell such a shit gag. I mean, it just doesn't scan at all, you don't smoke in yourself. It sounds like the sort of joke a very young child devises when they haven't quite got the hang of wordplay and the like.

To this day I'm still not certain I wasn't missing something.

I've not watched a lot of Chubby but it seems a lot of his material is just utterly utterly crap aside from any moral problems or whatever.  His HIV / Versace 'joke' I can barely remember is something about "I didn't realise HIV stood for homing in on Versace".

bobloblaw

Quote from: Utter Shit on April 17, 2018, 11:24:13 AM
I always thought the point of the joke was that the punchline was so mundane, anti-comedy like you said, but I saw something online recently which (mis?)interpreted it as a 'proper' joke based on wordplay - "to get to the other side" meaning "to die". Now I don't know what to think.

yes that's what was 'revealed' to me in my late 30s.

the world still turns but not at the angle it once did.

smudge1971

My own take on the chicken crossing the road has always been it crossed because "coz it heard your mum was being laid by a rugby team."

Laid. Chicken. Do ya get me joke, Carter? D'ya get it? No, nor do I much.

easytarget

Quote from: Utter Shit on April 17, 2018, 05:19:54 PM
Not a joke as such, but I always used to mishear the ending theme of Fools and Horses  as "where it all comes from is Mr. Reeve", assuming Mr. Reeve was some unseen controller of the Peckham underworld who Del gets his gear from.
Ha
I really like that.
Mr Reeve - a figure so shadowy that he's never referred to in the show (except in the opening credits)

thenoise

Dad's Army was rendered a lot bleaker for me as a child as I interpreted the end credits as them having been sent off to the war (presumably to die).  I dreaded one day stumbling across the episode where this would actually happen, rather than the endless hours of them bumbling around the church hall at Walmington-on-Sea.

It didn't help when I asked my parents why I hadn't seen Private Walker for a few episodes and was told that he was the 'first of them to die'.  Thankfully I was spared the episode featuring his demise too!