What is the punchline of your favorite joke?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the punchline of your favorite joke?

(I asked this previously in 2016 but that attendance sheet was so hilarious that it went missing, and I never saw the survey results. So neither did you.)

Some punchlines were to popular jokes:

• orange you glad I didn't say banana
• to get to the other side
• A-salted
• they always take things literally
• a one-eyed grape
• that's what they said
• ba dum ching
• awkward silence

I hear you, awkward silence, I hear you. (Someone also wrote "crickets", which could be a description of the noise emphasizing lack of laughter, or an actual punchline consisting of the word "crickets".)

Some punchlines made it seem possible to fill in the missing joke setup:

• hose A, hose B
• "moo"
• mooooooo
• "Broccoli, 49 cents!"
• A plant!
• Royal Executive Bond
• Juan on Juan
• Red Wedding [<-- dark="" humor="" li="">
• jk, rowling
• cheep!

Some punchlines were inscrutable:

• It's a brick!
• [student's own name]
• "Not Today"
• "Well, in the state of Wyoming, it's illegal to wave your firearm in public."
• Tony
• blue, blue, blue, blue.
• suh, dude

Protest vote appeared as "my jokes are spontaneous, not scripted". Depleted imagination wrote, "can't remember, sry". One student actually wrote both the setup and the punchline, in violation of the question.


This post's theme word is persiflage (n. formal!), "light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter." Knock-knock jokes? I shun such persiflage and rely solely upon puns for my humor.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

I take attendance by asking the students a question.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

As before, many students picked onomatopoeias:

• swish
• poof
• shmrshmrshmrshmr
• boom skrrt
• clap
• bloooop
• whoosh!
• cloooop

Others chose to describe it in other ways:

• little air molecules getting pushed off to adventure
• magnificent
• jazz hands
• sound of hand and face clapping
• like Pacman
• nothing
• the sound of silence
• a very faint buzzing

Still others used their response to issue a protest against the question:

• What is the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one is there to hear it?
• the answer to zen riddles must be spontaneous, and I've already heard this one
• inconceivable!
• clap, otherwise it wouldn't be clapping.

This week's Melancholy Monument has a plaque at the base engraved in honor of the various students who wrote, "the sadness of a missed high five", "the sound of sadness", and simply, "sad".

This post's theme word is krummholz, "stunted trees near the timber line on a mountain." The clumsy hermit's logging expedition near the krummholz avoided people but resulted in a lifelong lack of a left hand.