Mathy One-Liners

To keep my edge, I read joke books and watch comedians. I modify the jokes I read and hear to fit my particular needs and, sometimes, I just steal a joke outright. I’d feel bad about doing this if I profited from it, but there is little to be gained by dropping a one-liner at a neighborhood happy hour.

I just finished 1001 One‑Liners and Short Jokes by Graham Cann. It compensates with quantity what it lacks in quality. Although most of the jokes are not good — and many rely on British English, and others reference British culture, so they’re lost on me — there are more than a few chestnuts in the mix. I used this modification of one of his jokes while having dinner with my in-laws recently:

I don’t like coffee. It’s just not my cup of tea.

It garnered guffaws from my mother-in-law and groans from my sons, so it had the intended effect.

Another joke from the book is mathematical:

When I was two, I was really anxious because my age had doubled in just one year. I thought, “If this keeps up, by the time I’m six, I’ll be 90!”

It’s a terrible joke, not least because I’m unaware of any toddler concerned about their age. But more importantly, it’s wrong. If your age doubled from one to two in a year, then it would double to four by age three, to eight by age four, to 16 by age five, and to 32 by age six. Graham Cann clearly hasn’t studied exponential growth.

The following are other mathy jokes from the book, most of which I’ve modified at least slightly.

• I took an algebra test at school yesterday. My kleptomania is getting out of hand.
• For the three o’clock race, I backed a horse at ten to one. It came in at a quarter past four.
• One of every four frogs is a leap frog.
• My gun is made from a dozen pigs. It’s a 12-boar.

Pie Rates of the Caribbean

• Thirty percent of car accidents in Sweden involve a moose. I say it’s time that we stop letting moose drive. (For the record, that statistic is likely fabricated. It’s estimated that there are 4,500 car accidents involving moose every year, but there are far more than 15,000 car accidents annually.)
• Did you hear about the constipated accountant? He tried to work it out with a pencil — but he couldn’t budget.
• To the man who invented zero: Thanks for nothing.
• Statistically, six of seven dwarfs are not Happy.
• I, for one, like Roman numerals.
• If every human in the world laid down end‑to‑end along the equator, most of them would drown.
• Ninety-nine percent of politicians give the rest of them a bad name.
• Light travels faster than sound, which is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
• I tried to change my password to “14 days,” but my computer said it was too week.

There were 288 others that I chose not to share, because they were two gross.