Our current task, as Serious Bloggers, is to pass judgment upon whether the Muffin Joke is funny. Here is the joke itself:
So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow, it’s hot in here!”
And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking muffin!”
John Tierney (New York Times) thinks the Muffin Joke is not funny. Brad DeLong (Berkeley) disagrees, claiming that the Muffin Joke is, in fact, funny, although he offers no argument to support his conclusion. Jack Balkin (Yale) also finds the Muffin Joke funny, and does offer a rationale:
The muffin joke is funny because it is self-undermining. The punch line undermines the suspension of disbelief that the joke’s narrative presumes. It is kind of like breaching the fourth wall in drama. It’s like the line in Dr.Strangelove “You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” or the Atheist Hymn we came up with in high school: “There is no God, there is no God, He told me so himself.”
He admits, however, that by offering this explanation, he has thereby wrung all of the funniness out of the Muffin Joke. That’s as may be.
I come down on the pro-Muffin-Joke side of the debate. To me, it’s quite funny. Is this some sort of Ivory-Tower Academics vs. Hard-Nosed Journalists thing?
Comments
95 responses to “The Great Muffin Joke Debate”
I think it’s funny that this post gets so many responses compared to the science posts I really come here for…I guess everyone is qualified to comment on it ;o)
I vote mildly funny; perhaps more in the “amusing” category. Not a patch on Holmes and Watson camping, of course, or even “what do you call a Rastafarian proctologist?”, but not un-funny.
It’s funnier if you haven’t heard that kind of joke before. Jokes (and other things) are funny when they are unexpected. Especially “other things”, like farts. If we’re talking humor, it has to go “potty” eventually and I’m shocked that it took 53 posts to get there. I’m pleased to rectify the situation.
Julianne, the joke with thesmalles target audience of all surely has to be the one invariably told among 1st Year students struggling, hour for hour, day for day, through the proves of analysis 1:
Let epsilon be smaller then zero.
The key to a successful blog is writing about things about which everyone can have an opinion. 🙂
[…] The Great Muffin Joke Debate […]
Why we laugh, and what is humor… two different questions.
An atom walks into a bar. He looks really depressed. The bartender serves him a beer, and says “Hey buddy, what’s wrong?” The atom says “well, it’s pretty bad. I think I lost an electron.” The bartender replies “Really? You sure?” Atom: “Yep. I’m positive.”
Or: Q. How do you kill a clown? A. Hit it in the face with an axe.
Q. What’s the difference between a bagpipe and an onion? A. No one cries when you chop up an bagpipe.
Finally: Bananas and stop lights are totally different. For a stop light, green means go, yellow means slow down, and red means stop. For a banana, green means slow down, yellow means go ahead, and red means…where’d you get that banana?
I vote funny but not as funny as the woof woof telegram joke, now that one has me creased every time I think of it.
It’s not funny to a talking muffin that is BURNING TO DEATH IN AN OVEN.
#57: the banana joke is Mitch Hedberg’s (may be rest in peace) and is only really funny as told with his cadence.
I am pro-muffin joke. My favored telling ends more with a startling scream: “AAAAH!! TALKING MUFFIN!!”
it’s funny to me.
what i find amusing is that most who don’t find it funny don’t offer a joke they like.
The muffin joke is funny. (But some of the jokes in this thread are funnier.)
The atheist joke, on the other hand, not very funny.
Strange, there is no wikipedia article on Talking Muffin.
As BSwift points out regarding the banana joke and is worth repeating delivery matters…. big time particularly if it is Mitch Hedberg.
Sorry, I vote only very slightly funny. Not quite self-referentially clever enough.
However – another joke that I do think is funny, but you can’t tell to very many people.
Q: What do you get when you cross a pig with a rat?
A: pig rat sin(theta), of course.
This is my favorite joke:
What’s brown and sticky?
A stick.
Jokes are context dependent. This one is good to tell in stuffy restaurants :
“How do you sell a deaf man a dog ?”
“I don’t know”.
“You say DO YOU WANT TO BUY A DOG ?”
Has to be loud enough to cause the whole restaurant to freeze. You may find some of your friends move table.
I’m going to definitely vote on the side of funny – this is a great joke! Of course, it has to be told with animation and timing.
Another joke I’ve always loved (in a vaguely similar vein):
A: “Ask me what my job is, and what the hardest part of it is.”
B: “What’s your job?”
A: “I’m a comedian”
B: “And what’s the harde…”
A: “Timing!”
And the (apologies to the Irish) Irish Knock-knock joke:
A: Want to hear a joke?
B: Okay
A: Say “Knock knock”
B: Knock knock.
A: Who’s there?
The muffin joke (as someone mentioned, better with sausages) is shocking because it isn’t what you expect, the same with many jokes – it’s just that here, it’s the joke itself we don’t expect!
After sufficiently careful analysis, any joke ceases to be funny.
Many people’s jokes have been of the “anti-humor” variety. Consider the following excellent example:
Q: What’s the difference between the a chicken and the Kyoto Protocol?
A: One is a domestic fowl and the other is an international agreement on climate change.
#22 ‘I hear a loud noise or Bang can make souffles go flat (like a pancake?)’
I may be spoon fed the obvious answer, but the Bang could make ‘flat universe’, No? The birthing Bang comes with a deafening silence.
Muffin top and whale tail are very descriptive and funny. I don’t know whether the same expression exists in English, but we call flabby elderly ladies’ upper arms ‘pilican bills’.
Not very funny, but that’s only cos there are better variants of it around.
Ironically though, there is no irony in the joke – interesting made up statistic – 90% of the time when people say that something is ironic, it’s not ! Which is terribly ironic.
This is amusing :
http://www.proudnerd.com/cgi-bin/store/nerdshop.cgi/1528951262/proudnerd.28448468
Althought the correct answer is obviously a houseboat…
I think John Preskill joke is much funnier :). At least it not cricket.
http://www.amazon.com/GUT-LOAD-CRICKET-DRINK-32/dp/B0002APVNO
Re #69: As the saying goes, dissecting humour is much like dissecting a frog, it’s not very pretty and both the frog and the humour tend to die in the process.
Re #66: Andy, laughing doesn’t even describe it. I was screaming. Oh, that felt good. The stick joke reminds me of my (now second and third) favorite jokes:
What is red and goes slam slam slam slam?
A four door tomato!
and
Where does the queen keep her armies?
In her sleevies.
p.s. The muffin joke was just okay, but this thread is priceless.