The best medicine
It is that time of the year:
(A note to the readers in India and elsewhere: This is a word play on Cinco de Mayo, which means the Fifth of May, and is a big day in Mexican history. For some reason, it has become yet another opportunity for us Americans to enjoy Mexican food.)
I have always loved jokes. The sillier the better. I blame it all on Madan’s cartoons in Anantha Vikatan, which I looked forward to week after week right from the time I could read Tamil.
In one of Madan’s cartoons, a patient is at the pre-op stage, and he asks the surgeon whether he would be able to play the violin after the surgery. To which the surgeon replies that he would, of course, be able to play the violin. Then the punchline: "Amazing, because I do not know how to play the violin."
It doesn't take much to amuse me, yes, but for the young kid that I was then, this cartoon was way up in the humor stratosphere. This joke is also one that I often use even now whenever I am in some healthcare context.
Through the years of blogging, I have also blogged about many such jokes that people have shared with me. Students in classrooms, students emailing me puns, grocery store clerks sharing jokes with me, neighbors, … Here are a few that I dug up from the old blogging platform.
The sillier the puns, the better. Like, have you heard this one before?
Q: What do you call a cow that is lying on the grass?
A: Ground beef!
Or, how about this:
Why do you have to "put your two cents in"... but it’s only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going?
Ready for more?
Some are, ahem, a tad academic. A few years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education had a piece about puns that a few cunning linguists shared at a recent gathering. (You know damn well that I wanted to trip you over "cunning linguists," right?) Consider the following one, for instance:
If you don’t know what introspection is, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.
Don't you love that? If you don't, well, "you need to take a long, hard look at yourself." 😁
The academic ones require a wee bit of thinking. They are not to be as obvious as a person slipping on a banana peel. So, consider that I have alerted you to put your thinking cap on when you read the pun that the author had rated as the best at that gathering:
Let me tell you a little about myself. It’s a reflexive pronoun that means “me.”
Get it? 😇
Not laughing yet? Ok, I will ease into more obvious silliness. Here are a couple more:
"Did I tell you guys about my pencil that broke?"
Pause.
"Oh, well, that's ok. There's no point to it."
I love visuals like this one:
I will end this post with a copy/paste from an old blog entry. This was from Wendy, who was one of the grocery store clerks who was always happy to talk with me, and she also fed me quite a few jokes that were almost always from her husband.
"I have a question for you" she began.
I knew it was something humorous that she was going to tell me. Perhaps she had been waiting for my face to appear in the store. She told me something like that once before--about how she had been making sure that she didn't forget a joke that her stand-up-comedian husband had told her and that she couldn't wait to tell me that. I suppose a reputation that I love puns and awfully silly jokes is a healthier reputation than anything else that I can hope for. I imagine a service after my death where people take turns delivering the silliest of punchlines.
"What is the one food that has caused the greatest grief and misery to humans?" she asked with a huge grin.
It had to be funny. It was obvious from her face.
"The one food?"
"Yes."
"I don't know ... potato?"
She seemed all the more tickled at my boring response.
"Wedding cake" she said.
Ok, ok, ok. Here’s a final one.
A former neighbor, Jim, taught me the word "exhaustipated." You can see that it is a combination of two words: Exhausted and constipated. Jim said that exhaustipated means “too tired to give a shit”, which is perhaps what you are feeling right now 🤣