Knock-Knock

I noticed yesterday that there were lots of kinds of jokes. The joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation.  It has a consistent narrative structure and type of humour.  Here are a few we know: elephant light bulb knock-knock chicken The list in Wikipedia is only a subset of all the cycles.  If one goes to the entry for Russian jokes, one finds a series of Russian cycle jokes there. The Wikipedia entry gives you a sense of how extensively humour has been applied to all kinds of circumstances, and how classification systems have been developed to organize jokes, to describe them and to understand them better. I hadn't heard of the 'two cow jokes' - political satire around the 1940s Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbour. Communism: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then gives you some milk. Fascism: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then sells you some milk. Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Nazism: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you. Another cycle that I found interesting is the Manta joke.  These are German jokes about a male driver of an Opel Manta - who is an aggressive driver, dull, lower class, macho, and infatuated with both his car and his blonde hairdresser girlfriend. There were two successful movies based on this premise.  Here is an example What does a Manta driver say after crashing into a tree? – Komisch--hab doch gehupt! ("Odd. I did honk!") This field is extensive - can you get a PhD in jokes?  With that question, one retrieves s long list of PhD jokes - demonstrating it is a joke cycle.  With an improvement in terminology one can retrieve various thesis topics for PhDs. Our floral image of the day - the stake says "Sweet Spirit".

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