LJ Idol Week One: e to the x without the S
Topic: Jayus, "from Indonesian, meaning a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.”
Physics students and physicists tell jokes. I don't know why it took Hollywood and the television industry so many decades to figure this out.
Physics students get a special thrill out of telling preciously esoteric jokes that make no sense to anyone without advanced training in higher mathematics.
For example, take one joke whose author has been lost in the mists of time: How do we know where Cauchy walked his dog? Because he left a residue at every pole. If you don't know that Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician who studied complex numbers, that a "line integral" adds up the numerical values along a curved path, that a "pole" is a place on a data field where the values suddenly become infinitely huge and stick out like a telephone pole on a flat plain, then all you see is the scatological side of the double entendre.
So, if you see one half of a double entendre, do you laugh? Or do you hear the sound of one hand clapping?
During the World Year of Physics in 2005, somebody at the local community cafe, the quirky little storefront that functions as a third space for residents of our suburb, organized an open-mike night for "physics comedy." This was not as much of a mental stretch as one might think, since our community has its secret stash of space-telescope hardware and scientific-programming tomes routinely top the local bestseller lists. So, as a good little holder of a B.S. degree in physics, cum laude and all that, I did an Internet search for "physics jokes" and compiled crib notes for my first-ever standup routine.
That night, I had my small but fervent audience chuckling until I came to the saga of e to the power x. Now, e is an irrational number: 2.718281828459 blah blah blah... it goes on forever without repeating. If you raise e to the power x, meaning you multiply e by itself x times, you get a mathematical function that remains the same no matter how many times you integrate and differentiate it. (Think of integration and differentiation as virtual machines that gobble up one equation and spit it out in a different version. Kind of like Google Translate, but for the universal language of science instead of our imperfect human tongues.)
So, with minimal glances down to my crib notes, I recounted the joke, again written originally by someone long forgotten:
There was a patient in a mental hospital who kept scaring all the other patients. He would go up to people and shout at them, "I differentiate you! I differentiate you!"
But there was one patient who wasn't bothered at all. He would just sit there and smile calmly as the guy yelled at him, "I differentiate you! I differentiate you!"
Finally the calm guy replied: "You can differentiate me all you want, and it won't change anything. I'm e to the power x."
Most folks in the audience tittered, but one guy with a face weathered as the granite of New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain angrily rose to his feet. He shouted, "This is not funny! It's wrong to make fun of people in mental hospitals!" The laughter faded, and my face felt hot. I hastened to finish up my set and sit down again.
The weathered-skin guy didn't say anything else to me that evening, but I later learned that he was the town "weirdo," so to speak. Eventually the cafe banned him because he would disrupt performances. Occasionally I saw him on the subway, yelling random thoughts against both ends of the political spectrum. Once I was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a date, and we were deep into a speculative conversation about alternate histories, and started shouting that we were unpatriotic. I wish I knew what to say, but sometimes there isn't anything to say.
A few months after the open-mike night, I dared to tell the joke again, this time to a few friends from my church. One of them screamed with laughter until the tears ran down his face. "I don't even know what it means and I think it's funny!" he howled. He no longer goes to my church, but I wonder whether he watches The Big Bang Theory.
This entry was originally posted at http://luscious-purple.dreamwidth.org/148821.html. Please feel free to comment either here or there.
Physics students and physicists tell jokes. I don't know why it took Hollywood and the television industry so many decades to figure this out.
Physics students get a special thrill out of telling preciously esoteric jokes that make no sense to anyone without advanced training in higher mathematics.
For example, take one joke whose author has been lost in the mists of time: How do we know where Cauchy walked his dog? Because he left a residue at every pole. If you don't know that Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician who studied complex numbers, that a "line integral" adds up the numerical values along a curved path, that a "pole" is a place on a data field where the values suddenly become infinitely huge and stick out like a telephone pole on a flat plain, then all you see is the scatological side of the double entendre.
So, if you see one half of a double entendre, do you laugh? Or do you hear the sound of one hand clapping?
During the World Year of Physics in 2005, somebody at the local community cafe, the quirky little storefront that functions as a third space for residents of our suburb, organized an open-mike night for "physics comedy." This was not as much of a mental stretch as one might think, since our community has its secret stash of space-telescope hardware and scientific-programming tomes routinely top the local bestseller lists. So, as a good little holder of a B.S. degree in physics, cum laude and all that, I did an Internet search for "physics jokes" and compiled crib notes for my first-ever standup routine.
That night, I had my small but fervent audience chuckling until I came to the saga of e to the power x. Now, e is an irrational number: 2.718281828459 blah blah blah... it goes on forever without repeating. If you raise e to the power x, meaning you multiply e by itself x times, you get a mathematical function that remains the same no matter how many times you integrate and differentiate it. (Think of integration and differentiation as virtual machines that gobble up one equation and spit it out in a different version. Kind of like Google Translate, but for the universal language of science instead of our imperfect human tongues.)
So, with minimal glances down to my crib notes, I recounted the joke, again written originally by someone long forgotten:
There was a patient in a mental hospital who kept scaring all the other patients. He would go up to people and shout at them, "I differentiate you! I differentiate you!"
But there was one patient who wasn't bothered at all. He would just sit there and smile calmly as the guy yelled at him, "I differentiate you! I differentiate you!"
Finally the calm guy replied: "You can differentiate me all you want, and it won't change anything. I'm e to the power x."
Most folks in the audience tittered, but one guy with a face weathered as the granite of New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain angrily rose to his feet. He shouted, "This is not funny! It's wrong to make fun of people in mental hospitals!" The laughter faded, and my face felt hot. I hastened to finish up my set and sit down again.
The weathered-skin guy didn't say anything else to me that evening, but I later learned that he was the town "weirdo," so to speak. Eventually the cafe banned him because he would disrupt performances. Occasionally I saw him on the subway, yelling random thoughts against both ends of the political spectrum. Once I was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a date, and we were deep into a speculative conversation about alternate histories, and started shouting that we were unpatriotic. I wish I knew what to say, but sometimes there isn't anything to say.
A few months after the open-mike night, I dared to tell the joke again, this time to a few friends from my church. One of them screamed with laughter until the tears ran down his face. "I don't even know what it means and I think it's funny!" he howled. He no longer goes to my church, but I wonder whether he watches The Big Bang Theory.
This entry was originally posted at http://luscious-purple.dreamwidth.org/148821.html. Please feel free to comment either here or there.