Absurdist Jokes / Nonsense Jokes / Anti-Jokes / Non-sequitur Jokes
My favorite nonsense jokes from middle school:
- If there are 10,000 stars in the sky, how many pancakes does it take to paint a doghouse purple?
Answer: None. Because a fish doesn’t have lungs! - Why are telephone poles so high?
Answer: Because motorcycles don’t have doors!
In actuality, although the joke part itself was always similar, we played loose with the answers, and sometimes even interchanged them (“because ice cream doesn’t have bones” or “because snakes don’t have legs”).
Here’s another variation to one of the jokes above with a serious answer:
If you’re going down a river at 2 MPH and your canoe loses a wheel, how much pancake mix would you need to reshingle your roof?
(Source with answer)
Why Are They Funny?
Admittedly, when I was in middle school, these jokes only appealed to certain people. Many people would sigh and roll their eyes in disgust.
But they’re funny because they require the listener to listen and think. Sometimes when we tell it, we’d go to an unsuspecting kid and all laugh together, and then we’d ask him, “Do you get it?” In this sense, they are quite similar to pranks.
And they are remarkably similar to math word problems that pose unrealistic scenarios, such as “George buys 120 apples to divide among his classmates.” These jokes are even closer to Fermi Questions in the High School Science Olympiad, like this one: How many blades of grass does a typical suburban house’s lawn have in the summer? (No. 15, source page)
Origin Unknown, But They Go Back Far
This reedit thread tackles the origin of these jokes and comes up with some fascinating leads — Martin Gardener in his Annotated Alice, the Smothers Brothers, No Soap Radio, and more.
I’ll just add that, in the original post of the thread, a reddit user claimed to the originator of a similar riddle, dating back to 1992-1994, but that’s definitely not true. We knew these jokes when I was in middle school in 1981-1983, and I know that they go back even further than that!
Update: Chat GPT’s take on their Origin
ChatGPT gave an interesting take on the origin of these jokes that I share below.
Absurdist, nonsense, or anti-jokes have roots in several traditions, including surrealist art, literature, and philosophy. Their origins are hard to pin down to a single point, but they have evolved from a combination of humor and logic-defying expressions found across cultures.
1. Surrealism and Dadaism (Early 20th Century):** Surrealism, an art and literary movement, sought to defy conventional logic and embraced absurdity. Dadaism, an earlier movement, also used nonsensical humor to reject traditional values. Artists and writers from these movements, like Salvador Dalí and Tristan Tzara, created bizarre, dreamlike works and dialogues that often didn’t make sense on the surface, influencing absurdist humor.
2. British Comedy (Mid-20th Century): Absurdist humor became more mainstream with groups like Monty Python in the 1960s. Their sketches were often non-sequiturs or surreal, breaking traditional joke structures. Shows like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” popularized humor where the punchline didn’t follow logically from the setup.
3. Anti-Jokes (Late 20th Century): The concept of the anti-joke, where the punchline intentionally subverts expectations by being either overly literal or nonsensical, gained traction in the late 20th century. Instead of delivering a humorous twist, the joke might reject the idea of humor altogether, making it funny precisely because it’s not funny in the conventional sense.
The question “How many pancakes does it take to paint a doghouse purple?” is a classic absurdist setup that thrives on the randomness of its elements and the illogical response, creating humor from the unexpected shift away from reason. The popularity of absurdist jokes is largely due to the way they challenge the audience to find humor in the rejection of logic and expectations.
In summary, the origin of these jokes is tied to avant-garde art movements like surrealism and dadaism, mixed with British comedy and modern anti-joke structures.
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