A funny thing happened ...

… at Making Light. Open thread 137 is 90% good humor, only about 5% politics. Good fun, for a while, over there.

I must correct one of the jokes: Skwid at comment #47 tells this one:

An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walk into a bar. Each orders a Guinness, and as they're served, a fly lands in each pint.

The Englishman sniffs at the affrontery of the fly and pushes his beer away in disgust.

The Scotsman blinks for a moment, shrugs, and tosses the pint back.

The Irishman turns bright red, fishes the fly out of the beer, and holds it over his glass shouting at it: "SPIT IT OUT, YE WEE BUGGER! SPIT IT OUT!"

He or she has got the Irishman and the Scot mixed up, there. See, Scots are legendarily thrifty. (Says this third generation Scots-American. Dinna ca' us "mean" or "cheap." We prefer "canny.") So the Scot in the joke, who should have been the one delivering the punchline, would be objecting to the loss of the amount of beer that a fly could swallow, because of the ethnic stereotype. That's what makes it funny.

Speaking of thrift:

And speaking of jokes, I'm still working on this one, which came to me in a moment of perinspiration:

"How do you change a seal into a sea lion?"

"Remove one of its electrons!"

I think it's funny, but that's just me. Can this possibly work anywhere but in a chemistry classroom?

Update: In the Making Light thread that gave rise to this post, Erik Nelson links to a nifty collection of surrealist jokes.