Cars have windows. Houses have windows. So it can’t be windows that makes the car go.
I swear I don’t understand, and he tried to explain it to me. He said it’s a double meaning with Windows the operating system but I just don’t don’t don’t get it.
Can anyone make this understandable to me? I may have screwed up the retelling, because honestly I have no idea what the hell’s going on with this joke.
AngryHumanoid ( @AngryHumanoid@reddthat.com ) 130•10 months agoIt was nothing to do with Windows, it’s a sorta joke where the person telling the joke is trying to use logic to compare 2 different things, with humorous results.
A better example is an old Norm Mcdonald (I think) joke, I’ll post it below.
A guy sees his new neighbor out in his backyard, so he decides to get acquainted. After introductions, he asks the new neighbor what he does for a living.
The new neighbor says, “I’m a professor.” The first neighbor then asks, “Oh yeah, what do you teach?”
“Logic,” the professor reponds.
“What is that?” the neighbor inquires.
“Well, let me see if I can give you an example…you have a dog, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” neighbor #1 responds.
“And you have children too, right?” says the professor.
“Wow, right again!” exclaims the neighbor.
"So, then you must be married and that would make you a heterosexual, right?‘’ proclaims the professor.
“Unbelievable, you’re absolutely correct. How do you know all this about me?”
“Well,” the professor says, “I observed there was a dog house in your backyard, so you must have a dog. I also saw bicycles next to your garage, so you must have children. And if you have children, you are probably married and if your married, you are most likely heterosexual… it was all logical!”
The next afternoon, the neighbor runs into his old friend. His friend asks if he has met the new neighbor. The man says that he met him yesterday.
“What’s he like?”
“Well,” the man says, “he’s nice and he is a professor of logic.”
“Oh,” says the friend, “what’s logic?”
“Maybe I can give you an example. Do you have a dog house?”
“Why, no, I do not,” responds the friend.
“Well, then,” proclaims the man, “that means you’re gay!”
TheLemming ( @u202307011927@feddit.de ) 18•10 months agoThe real joke is always in the comm…–
We don’t do that here, sorry, I forgot
Herbstzeitlose ( @Herbstzeitlose@feddit.de ) 39•10 months agoBut you added clutter to the comments all the same. Good job.
NotAnonymousAtAll ( @NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.de ) 79•10 months agoI would argue that:
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This is not actually a joke in the strict sense of the word. There is no punchline. The humor is entirely in the context.
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Your friend does not understand any of this and is just repeating the “joke” because other people laughed about it at some point. It has nothing to do with the Windows operating system, so if that was part of his explanation he is probably just making shit up to cover his own ignorance.
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thatsTheCatch ( @thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz ) 58•10 months agoThis reminds me of a similar joke:
Sharks can swim faster than humans. But humans can run faster than sharks. So in a triathlon, it all comes down to who can bike the fastest
Now THAT’S a joke!
yads ( @yads@lemmy.ca ) 15•10 months agoI guess the joke is that someone is using logic and reasoning to figure out what propels a car as though it was some great mystery that needed to be analyzed and thought about. I don’t think it’s very funny and it could have also been your friend’s delivery.
Bizarroland ( @Bizarroland@kbin.social ) 3•10 months agoYeah to me it reads like an example of stupid genius. Like you’re smart enough to be able to logically equate similarities between different things while trying to use Aristotelian logic to uncover a fundamental truth about something.
Oh in this case like you said, what makes the car go. And the idea is let’s find other things that also have similarities with cars and see if we can figure out what makes the car go based off of these similarities, and in this specific case we’re looking at windows and since cars go and they have Windows but houses don’t go and they also have Windows then it can’t be the windows that make the car go.
But it’s definitely one of those things that would only be funny in context of somebody mentally reasoning through this in situ and coming to this conclusion by their own cognitive processes.
Of course, explaining a joke doesn’t make it funny and if you have to explain a joke then it wasn’t funny to begin with so yeah.
It’s kind of like the time I told a female friend, that I wasn’t dating, that, “if I didn’t like the way she sucked my dick then she wouldn’t like the way I ate her pussy”. It made everybody laugh but none of you are going to find that funny.
It’s one of those things that sounds really bad by itself but in the situation it was hilarious and it was good-natured and only mildly offensive at the time.
SirNuke ( @SirNuke@kbin.social ) 14•10 months agoThis might not be what your friend is going for, but I smirked slightly and this is how I interpret it:
I particularly like jokes that take something absurd and launder it through the structure of things that do make sense. Everything in your friend’s joke is factually true. It’s structured as a logically consistent argument.
And yet it is completely nonsensical. No one has ever thought that windows make something move. It invoked a slightly confused response in me, which is why I found it funny.
It’s not a great joke, but I might tell it to feel out someone’s sense of humor plus whether they pick up on that I’m doing so. I think the analogy to Windows makes it a weaker joke, but I would give that as an explanation just to mess with someone a little.
That DOES sound like him
SirNuke ( @SirNuke@kbin.social ) 1•10 months agoIf he’s someone that’s normally good at being funny - that is good at finding humorous observations and wording things that get people to laugh - then I’d say he’s messing with you.
I would mess with him right back by acting like I’m very seriously trying to understanding the joke and ask increasingly dumb questions until he realizes that yes, I knew exactly what he was doing. Or a knowing smirk if that’s too much.
(Yes this comment is very revealing about my childhood)
jlow (he/him) ( @jlow@beehaw.org ) 3•10 months agoYeah, it made me think of my mother’s favourite joke, which is completely bizarre:
What’s the difference between a blackbird? Both legs are the same length, especially the left one.
🤷♀️
AngrilyEatingMuffins ( @AngrilyEatingMuffins@kbin.social ) 4•10 months agoTime flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. - Groucho Marx
Phantom_Engineer ( @Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml ) 13•10 months agoI’ve heard this before, but more in the context of a proverb than a proper joke. As far as meaning, I think it’s along the lines of “correlation doesn’t equal causation,” but not exactly.
Jimmycrackcrack ( @Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml ) 4•10 months agoYeh I think if he hadn’t called it a “joke” the meaning would come more naturally but then again he explicitly said it’s somehow got something to do with the operating system called windows so WTF?
ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠 ( @Nemo@midwest.social ) 10•10 months agoThe humor comes from the unexpected final line. It’s what’s sometimes called an anti-joke, where instead of a punchline the final line is so banal as to be ridiculous, and that unexpected banality is the source of the humor.
Susaga ( @Susaga@ttrpg.network ) English4•10 months agoI love anti-jokes, but it’s hard to enjoy them if you’re expecting an anti-joke, which makes looking up anti-jokes really unsatisfying.
GARlactic ( @GARlactic@lemm.ee ) 7•10 months agoI am so confused right now. I don’t see the joke written down anywhere. The post just links to an AI generated looking image of a woman in a red dress sitting on a red car in front of a building. Is that the joke itself?
Sorry the joke is in bold. It’s about cars and windows.
Very_Bad_Janet ( @Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social ) 3•10 months agoAre you also on kbin? Kbin post images are sort of their own joke, unfortunately.
AI generated image of a car parked in front of a building. I got the woman for free, because SkyNet.
Lemvi ( @Lemvi@lemmy.sdf.org ) 5•10 months agoI’d say the joke is probably that you are logically deducting something thats already obvious to everyone, portraying logicians as people that are far removed from reality
federalreverse-old ( @federalreverse@feddit.de ) 1•10 months ago*deducing, not deducting. Also, you seem to be talking about the joke from the comments. And the joke from the comments makes fun of the man misapplying logic rather than making fun of the logician.
Lemvi ( @Lemvi@lemmy.sdf.org ) 2•10 months agoNope, talking about the joke in the post.
federalreverse-old ( @federalreverse@feddit.de ) 1•10 months agoIt’s just misapplied logic. No ivory-tower logicians in sight anywhere to make fun of.
You could maybe use that joke in such a way, if you actually had a logician in front of you whom you’d want to piss off.
Miku Luna \ she/it ( @backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 5•10 months agoSomething has to be the reason the car can move, and it can’t be the windows because houses have windows and they don’t move.
Mothra ( @Mothra@mander.xyz ) 4•10 months agoAll I get is that if two things have the same feature and one moves but the other doesn’t, then what causes the movement isn’t that feature.
Here I guess it means Windows isn’t the reason anything moves forward, aka progress, but if there is more meaning to it I’m not getting it
kubica ( @kubica@kbin.social ) 4•10 months agoI can’t recall correctly but I think there was a similar one with alcohol. Someone that used to mix alcohol with other drinks. In the end he always ended up drunk so he decided to stop mixing it.
penquin ( @penquin@lemmy.kde.social ) 3•10 months agoDoes he by any chance use Linux? 😂 Sounds like a Linux joke about Windows.
Rocky60 ( @Rocky60@lemm.ee ) 2•10 months agoReminds me of the Seinfeld New Yorker comic episode
magnetosphere ( @HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org ) English1•10 months agoIt’s not really a joke in the strictest sense, it’s more like a funny observation.
I recognize this from a TV show or movie or something. It’s not talking about the Windows OS. It’s talking about ordinary glass windows.
Someone said that it was like ancient Greek philosophers trying to answer a question - by dissecting it, breaking it down to the most basic parts, and using very strict (almost pedantic) logic to narrow down the possibilities. In this example, they’re trying to figure out what makes cars move, and have ruled out windows as the reason.
You could replace the word “windows” with the word “doors”, and it would still make sense.