1) Babies are illogical.
2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3) Illogical persons are despised.
Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.
And:
1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
2) No modern poetry is free from affection.
3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles.
4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.
5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.
Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.
Both of these were pulled from Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. (Fun fact: Steve Martin majored in philosophy.) Reminds me of this quote:
The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in similar ways. That’s because philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.
I wouldn’t be opposed to reading a book, or at least a Tumblr, full of such logical funnies. In fact, I may start writing some myself.
I’m also reminded of this joke that Steven Landsburg and Xan shared:
Three logicians walk into a bar.
The bartender says: “Would any of you guys like a drink?”
The first logician says: “I don’t know.”
The second logician says: “I don’t know.”
The third logician says: “No.”
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Other things from Steve Martin that made me laugh: His personal thank you note and his business card.
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In the book, Martin said that this line, which he stole from a friend, saved his job on The Smothers Brothers:
It has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance.
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The thing that gave me the biggest laugh the past couple of days was this question that came up on OkCupid:
Under the right circumstances, would you allow a partner to lick your anus?
There’s something about prefacing this question with “under the right circumstances” that made this hilariously hard to answer.
