On Language

Best Bar Jokes — Bar None

A punderful adventure for Mensans

BYRICHARDLEDERER

CHARLES DICKENS walks into a bar and orders a martini. The bartender asks, “Olive or twist?”

Rene Descartes walks into a bar, and the bartender asks him if he’d like a drink. Descartes replies, “I think not” — and POOF, he disappears.

A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, “Why the long face?”

The horse says, “I’m depressed.”

The bartender wonders, “Maybe that’s because you drink too much. Might you be an alcoholic?”

The horse says, “I don’t think I am” — and POOF, he disappears. (Did you notice that in the last two jokes I put Descartes before the horse?)

The formula “A _____ walks into a bar” has provided the take-off point for scads of jokes over the years. Here’s an in-bar scenario that centers on grammar and rhetoric:

An oxymoron walks into a bar. The silence is deafening as she orders some fresh-frozen jumbo shrimp.

Then, taking everything for granite, a malapropism walks into the same bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions.

A mixed metaphor then walks into the bar. She has a mind like a steel sieve and kindles a flood of attention from the crowd.

A paradox walk into the bar; they examine everybody.

A cliché walks into the bar, looking busy as a beaver and a bee, happy as a clam, a lark, and a pig in spit, and crazy as a bedbug, a coot, and a loon.

Then into the bar walks a misplaced modifier with a glass eye named Hilda.

Into the bar walks an Oxford comma, who spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.

Faster than greased lightning, a hyperbole blasts into the bar and takes our breath away by wreaking a gazillion times more havoc than ever before in history. Then, the past, present, and future walk in, and the room gets really tense.

But things calm down when a consonant walks into the bar and sits down next to a vowelly girl. “Hi!” he says. “I’ll alphabet that you’ve never been here before.”

“Of cursive, I have,” she replies. “I come here, like, all the time. For me, it’s parse for the course.”

The consonant remains stationery, enveloped by the vowelly girl’s letter-perfect charm. His initial reaction is to make small talk for the introductory phrase of his come-on: “Here’s a cute joke,” he states declaratively. “Have you heard about the fellow who had half his digestive tract removed? He walked around with a semi-colon.”

“Are you, like, prepositioning me?” asks the vowelly girl accusatively, disparaging the consonant’s dash of humor.

“I won’t be indirect. You are the object of my preposition,” the consonant sighs. “Your pluperfect beauty phrase my nerves. Won’t you come up to my place for a coordinating conjunction?”

“I don’t want to be diacritical of you, but you’re, like, such a boldfaced character!” replies the vowelly girl. “Like, do I have to spell it out to you, or are you just plain comma-tose? You’re like those apostrophes — way too possessive. You’re like Algerian, Helvetica, and Sans Serif, meaning you’re not my type, if you get my point, so get off my case!”

Despite his past perfect, he is, at present, tense. Feeling a lot of stress, the consonant worries he’s going to bee [sic].

“Puh-leeze, gag me with a spoonerism!” the vowelly girl objects accusatively, deleting an expletive. “As my Grammar and other correlatives used to say, your mind is in the guttural. I resent your umlautish behavior. You should know what the wages of syntax are. I nominative absolutely decline to conjugate with you, fer sure!”

“You get high quotation marks for that one,” the consonant smiles, “even if I think you’re being rather subjunctive and moody about all this. I so admire your figure of speech that I would like to predicate my life on yours.” So, he gets himself into an indicative mood and says, “It would be appreciated by me if you would be married to me.”

“Are you being passive-aggressive?” she asks interrogatively.

“No, I’m speaking in the active voice. Please don’t have an inconsonant irritable vowel movement about this. I simile want to say to you, ‘Metaphors be with you!’ I would never want to change you and become a misplaced modifier. It’s imperative that you understand that I’m very, very font of you and want us to spend infinitive together.”

“That’s quite a complement,” she blushes — and gives him appositive response.

At the ceremony they exchange wedding vowels about the compound subject of marriage. Finally, they say, “I do.” Turns out that “I do” is the longest and most complex of sentences — a run-on sentence, actually — one that we all hope won’t turn out to be a sentence fragment or an incomplete sentence.

Then the minister diagrams that sentence and says, “I now pronouns you consonant and vowel.”

They kiss each other on the ellipses and whisper, “I love you, noun forever.”

Throughout their marriage, they avoid yeast inflections, their structure is perfectly parallel, and their verbs never disagree with their subjects. After many a linking verve, comma splice, and interjection, they conceive the perfect parent thesis. Then come some missing periods and powerful contractions, and into the world is born their beautiful little boy. They know he is a boy because of his dangling participle.