Wide Wide World Puns

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/14/a-nice-sterile-eye-pad/?ncid=rss_truncated

When my wife said that she wanted to use this quarantine time to get Thinner, I just laughed.

She's thinking of "The Stand."

It’s a small world.

Trevor loved tractors. And I mean, really loved tractors. Forget any obsessions or high-level interests you may have, chances are they pale in the face of Trevor’s love for tractors.

Every day Trevor would get up, in his tractor-themed bedroom in his tractor-themed house, with its tractor-themed wallpaper and tractor-themed carpets, and he would make his bed with its tractor-themed duvet and tractor-themed sheets. He would go downstairs in his tractor-themed pajamas into his tractor-themed kitchen, with its tractor-themed tiles and cupboards, and he would eat his breakfast while perusing the latest tractor-themed magazine or annual.

Trevors’s degree in Agricultural Engineering hung on his living room wall, along with a copy of his thesis, which centred around (you guessed it) tractors. The living room was decorated with all sorts of tractor-related trinkets, including die-cast models, paintings and drawings.

The hedges in Trevor’s front garden were trimmed in the shape of tractors. His lawn was vividly decorated with tractor-driving garden gnomes, and his garden furniture was constructed from various parts from vintage tractor designs.

Trevor just had one thing missing from his otherwise tractor-centric life; he had never actually owned, nor driven, a real tractor.

Not for his lack of trying, of course. Trevor had been to many tractor shows over the years, and visited many farms with friends of his, but none of the tractors he had seen had ever been quite right. Trevor was so knowledgeable about tractors that every single one he had come across had possessed some hidden trait that he wasn’t keen on. His first experience of driving a real tractor had to be perfect.

One day, Trevor was flicking through one of his favourite publications, Powertrain Quarterly, when there was a knock at the door. Trevor answered, and it was his friend and fellow tractor enthusiast, Jeff.

Trevor welcomed Jeff in, and over tea and crumpets served on tractor-themed crockery, they discussed the merits of aluminium drawbars and front-end loaders. Eventually Trevor pressed Jeff to explain the reason for his visit.

“Well” said Jeff, “As I’m sure you know the convention comes to town later”.

The convention. Trevor had been thinking of little else the past three weeks. The neighbouring town annually threw a convention for farmers, particularly farmyard machinery. There would be combine harvesters, lawnmowers, and of course, tractors.

“Yes of course” replied Trevor

A young man comes up with a great idea for a new shipping method. He designs everything himself, hires people to create models, and deduces that he can use old fashioned boating technology to increase shipping speeds by up to 350%. This is obviously a great innovation, so he calls up a former Business professor from college and gets into contact with a manufacturer. The manufacturer makes the man come in and present his design to the board of directors, so they schedule a meeting in two weeks.

At the meeting, the board is blown away. The man’s charisma, design, and equations all point to a massive innovation in shipping. The company is poised to make a huge profit. Construction starts immediately.

On his flight back, the man happens to sits next to his old buddy from high school, Jimmy. Jimmy tells the man that he has just blown the farming world wide open. His new GMO potato produces five times as much energy and has been the talk of the world. Jimmy says that all the news outlets have been reporting potatoes to be the next big superfood, and his design is poised to make him millions, if not billions of dollars. Jimmy pitches the man for the entire plane ride, and convinced him. They hop on the next flight back to visit the board of directors once again. The board is shocked. Both ideas stand to make billions of dollars for the company, but there is one slight problem.

The CEO says to the man, “we know you have these two ideas. However, we can only allocate enough resources to make one of them profitable. I recommend you take some time off and really decide which of these ideas you want our company to produce. We can schedule a meeting in a few weeks if that works for you.”

The man says right back to the CEO, “I’m going to take a walk and clear my head. This is a big decision” and walks right out of the room.

Not even five seconds later the man comes back into the room and says “I’ve made my decision. Let’s go with the shipping method.” This shocks the CEO, who says “are you sure?? This is a billion dollar decision and you only took five seconds to think about it.”

The man looks back at him and says “well, in this business time is money— so I decided to make my decision schooner rather than tater”

We're a fairly advanced society, we need jokes with content that makes us think. All these easy laughs are making us dumber by the second, and we just keep rewarding them with upvotes that convince the lazy among us to keep churning out lazy jokes. Comedy is one of the only common traits things in every society and culture on this planet and we may not always agree with what is funny, it's very subjective, but no society or culture has no comedy. It's one of the most effective unifiers in all human existence. Of course it's just my two cents, but we really need to avoid cheapening it. There are 6500 spoken languages in the world and this is the most widely spoken, the least spoken languages of course being sign language. Someone once said "a world without laughter would be like a world without warmth, a dark hole in the ground filled with cold water." I know they mean well, but I think it's worse than that. There are three unwritten rules for how comedy should function in the world. We have to learn to follow them or we're doomed as a people, forever, however just like there are two butts in the word "assassin", there are two caveats to this dire situation with lessons learned from the best there is. One is the lesson we can take from Switzerland, I'm not entirely sure what makes them so good at integrating comedy into their lives, but their flag is a huge plus. The other is the lesson we can learn from farmers who know how to put what's important first, how to put in the effort into growing something, and they are always outstanding in their field. We get too caught up in standard modalities of thinking and none of us are totally all right, in fact most of us are at least close to half left. In closing, the absence of comedy when you really think about it, is fear. Fear of the ups and downs of life, much like a fear of elevators. And just like a fear of elevators, we all must take steps to avoid it. Thank you for your time.

Disappointed

For reference: Link to wiki

Some of these are done in a kind of "news headline"-style:

• Choir leader fired after using too much sexual innuendo; "Lewd Ex Cantor."

• Video on demand about a street where nothing happens; "Vod of the Boring Alley."

• Man's brutal cousin turns out to be a great bloke; "Raw-Ted, Great Dude".

• Panic spreads as toilet facilities take over the world; "Cry! Stall-Age."

• A man orders a book of basic letters to look after his daughters belongings while he looks after the others; "ABC, Watch Her's!".

• Sams brother cheats a dude; "Dean Cons the Peep."

• A ride in the amusement park offers a wide range of emotions; "High! Low! Woo! Nah."

• A weird and hard to describe new dessert; "Cold Lemon Thing."

• A new star in stand up rises! Come see "Puntiff Sulyvahn."

• Pirates start eating fava beans and a new drink is required; "Yo! Ho! The Chianti!."

• A Long lived man has an unusual apetite for fish; "Old-Rick, Devourer of Cods".

• In Bacteria-Town, a devastating disease strikes one inhabitant working at a hotel; "Cancer of the Borrelia Valet".

• Roman god Cubid is ordered to take a woman to cave and kill her; "Drag and Slay Her Amor"

• Osiris's statue has been in way too many marriages and people have started to call it; "Osiris the Consummated Thing."

• The choir leader from before is transformed into a mushroom; "Champignon Cantor"

• An english man becomes the leader of a Polish airplane company and gets nicknamed; "LOT-Rick"

• An impatient tree person attacks a random mythical hunter; "Antsy Ent! Why Hern?!"

• Horse named Elvis keeps making noise and a man shouts;"Neigh Less King!"

• A child opens a chocolate egg and a white spirit jumps out; "Soul of Kinder"

Sorry about the possible typos.

My wife’s gone to the Caribbean.

Oh, Jamaica?

No, she went of her own accord.

He does it mainly with other dads. Who all seem to be in on it and ALWAYS ask "Jamaica"as opposed to another Caribbean island! It's like a world wide conspiracy.