Alex's Blog

Here’s a joke I’ve seen doing the rounds:

Don’t know if this is just a sick coincidence but…. 2007 – Chinese year of the Chicken – Bird Flu Pandemic devastates parts of Asia 2008 – Chinese year of the Horse – Equine Influenza decimates Australian racing 2009 – Chinese year of the Pig – Swine Flu Pandemic kills pigs/humans around the globe. It gets worse…. Next year… 2010 – Chinese year of the Cock -what could possibly go wrong?

And in a briefer Twitter version:

2007 – year of chicken (bird flu). 2008 – year of horse (equine flu). 2009 – year of pig (swine flu) – shit – 2010 is year of the cock.

This fails as a joke on so many levels, it might actually be funny after all, but only as a hilarious example of how not to construct a joke:

• The years are wrong. 2007 was pig, 2008 rat, 2009 ox, 2010 tiger. And equine flu hit Australia in 2007.
• You don’t even need to look up the years anyway, as obviously a chicken and a cock are the same frickin’ animal (rooster, incidentally, which was 2005)
• The punchline asks us to imagine a scenario where genitals catch influenza, which doesn’t make much sense.

When I point out the failure of this joke, I get comments like “it’s supposed to be a joke – why let facts get in the way?”. Well, a good joke shouldn’t have glaring errors in it – if the audience’s response to a joke is “huh? Is that right? That doesn’t quite sound correct to me” then you’ve fucked it up.

Three men walk into a bar – an Englishman, an Irish woman, a Scotsman, a young Welsh girl and pigeon. The barman says, “is this some kind of poorly constructed joke?”

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.