Cars have windows. Houses have windows. So it can’t be windows that makes the car go.
I swear I don’t understand, and he tried to explain it to me. He said it’s a double meaning with Windows the operating system but I just don’t don’t don’t get it.
Can anyone make this understandable to me? I may have screwed up the retelling, because honestly I have no idea what the hell’s going on with this joke.
It was nothing to do with Windows, it’s a sorta joke where the person telling the joke is trying to use logic to compare 2 different things, with humorous results.
A better example is an old Norm Mcdonald (I think) joke, I’ll post it below.
A guy sees his new neighbor out in his backyard, so he decides to get acquainted. After introductions, he asks the new neighbor what he does for a living.
The new neighbor says, “I’m a professor.” The first neighbor then asks, “Oh yeah, what do you teach?”
“Logic,” the professor reponds.
“What is that?” the neighbor inquires.
“Well, let me see if I can give you an example…you have a dog, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” neighbor #1 responds.
“And you have children too, right?” says the professor.
“Wow, right again!” exclaims the neighbor.
"So, then you must be married and that would make you a heterosexual, right?‘’ proclaims the professor.
“Unbelievable, you’re absolutely correct. How do you know all this about me?”
“Well,” the professor says, “I observed there was a dog house in your backyard, so you must have a dog. I also saw bicycles next to your garage, so you must have children. And if you have children, you are probably married and if your married, you are most likely heterosexual… it was all logical!”
The next afternoon, the neighbor runs into his old friend. His friend asks if he has met the new neighbor. The man says that he met him yesterday.
“What’s he like?”
“Well,” the man says, “he’s nice and he is a professor of logic.”
“Oh,” says the friend, “what’s logic?”
“Maybe I can give you an example. Do you have a dog house?”
“Why, no, I do not,” responds the friend.
“Well, then,” proclaims the man, “that means you’re gay!”
The real joke is always in the comm…–
We don’t do that here, sorry, I forgot
I would argue that:
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This is not actually a joke in the strict sense of the word. There is no punchline. The humor is entirely in the context.
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Your friend does not understand any of this and is just repeating the “joke” because other people laughed about it at some point. It has nothing to do with the Windows operating system, so if that was part of his explanation he is probably just making shit up to cover his own ignorance.
Interesting take, but I don’t think I can agree. While typical American humor is often based on question-answer/punchline structure, many comedians managed to excel at purposefully breaking it.
Think about Joe Cera, John Wilson, Nathan Fielder even Jon Benjamin or David Cross. They are all very funny (it the audience that vibes with their style), yet usually avoid the idea of buildup-punchline.
For a more universal surreal humor you need look no further than the granddaddies of the entire school: The Monty Python crew. They often went out of their way to ridicule the idea of a punchline and were/are some of the funniest people in history.
(You could always argue that humor does not equal jokes I guess, but these were just my 2 cents)
This reminds me of a similar joke:
Sharks can swim faster than humans. But humans can run faster than sharks. So in a triathlon, it all comes down to who can bike the fastest
The poster commenting on mobile homes forgets that he’s not saying that all houses can’t move, just that if any houses can’t move, the windows must not be a factor
Diogenes would have fucked that dude up
I guess the joke is that someone is using logic and reasoning to figure out what propels a car as though it was some great mystery that needed to be analyzed and thought about. I don’t think it’s very funny and it could have also been your friend’s delivery.
Yeah to me it reads like an example of stupid genius. Like you’re smart enough to be able to logically equate similarities between different things while trying to use Aristotelian logic to uncover a fundamental truth about something.
Oh in this case like you said, what makes the car go. And the idea is let’s find other things that also have similarities with cars and see if we can figure out what makes the car go based off of these similarities, and in this specific case we’re looking at windows and since cars go and they have Windows but houses don’t go and they also have Windows then it can’t be the windows that make the car go.
But it’s definitely one of those things that would only be funny in context of somebody mentally reasoning through this in situ and coming to this conclusion by their own cognitive processes.
Of course, explaining a joke doesn’t make it funny and if you have to explain a joke then it wasn’t funny to begin with so yeah.
It’s kind of like the time I told a female friend, that I wasn’t dating, that, “if I didn’t like the way she sucked my dick then she wouldn’t like the way I ate her pussy”. It made everybody laugh but none of you are going to find that funny.
It’s one of those things that sounds really bad by itself but in the situation it was hilarious and it was good-natured and only mildly offensive at the time.
