It Never Worked Before: Nine Intellectual Jokes

A curated collection of intellectual jokes that actually teach interesting ideas and make you think, not just rely on insider-jargon and smart-people stereotypes

Below are nine of my favorite¹ intellectual jokes. In the final section, I offer a small treatise on when I like them, and why I consider many other “smart people jokes” to not reach this bar.

Philosophy

In xenosociology class we learned about a planet full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then they think it’s very unlikely that it’d rise again.

As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. An Earth xenosociologist visits the planet and studies them assiduously for 6 months. At the end of her stay, she asked to be brought to their greatest scientists and philosophers, and poses the question: “So why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” The lead philosopher of science looks at her in pity as if she’s a child, and replies:

“Well, it never worked before…”

_

A mob drags a man into a police station for running over 13 people, while shouting "Murderer!" "Killer!" The policeman disperses the crowd and begins to interrogate the suspect.

The policeman: "Tell me what happened."

The suspect: " Sir I was driving home within the speed limit when my brakes failed. I had no choice but to crash the car into a group of 12 people or to swerve into a single person. Am I a monster for deciding to swerve into a single person?"

Policeman: “No, that sounds like a difficult yet reasonable decision. But tell me how did you end up killing 13 people?"

Suspect :" Well that selfish bastard ran towards the other 12.”

__

It was a difficult task, he thought, but someone had to do it.

As he walked away, he wondered who that someone would be.

Drawing Hands by MC Escher

Mathematics

A physicist, a mathematician and an engineer were attending a conference. That night, they're sleeping on different floors of the same hotel.

The engineer wakes up to see that his room is on fire. He quickly activates all the emergency fire hydrant systems in his room, completely putting out the fire but drenching his room in the process. He gets back to bed and uncomfortably goes to sleep.

The physicist wakes up to see that her room is on fire. She takes a pitcher, walks to the bathroom, and carefully estimates how much water is needed to put out the fire. She puts out the fire with precisely the right amount of water, gets back to bed and goes to sleep.

The mathematician wakes up to see that his room is on fire. He takes out a pencil and notepad, walks to his desk, and starts madly scribbling. The fire gets bigger and bigger and he scribbles faster and faster. Finally, he writes QED down, and slams his notepad on his desk. "A ha! I have proven that it's possible to solve the fire problem!" He gets back to bed and goes to sleep.

Psychology

Two behaviorists were having sex. One turns to the other and asks: “That was good for you. Was it good for me?”

__

Q: How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.

Economics

A security guard comes across a drunk man on his hands and knees under a streetlight, frantically searching the pavement.

"Lost something?" asks the guard.

"My keys," groans the drunk.

"Where'd you drop them?"

The drunk points into the darkness. "About thirty feet that way, by my car."

"Then why are you looking here?"

"The light's better."

AI

Did you know? The moon landing was staged. It was faked by Stanley Kubrick.

But Kubrick was a perfectionist, so he insisted that they shoot on location.

_

A man and a dog are playing chess.

The dog uses its paw to carefully move a pawn and takes another pawn. The man sighs and rolls his eyes.

A woman walks by and says “wow your dog is really smart!”

The man turns towards her with a look of sheer incredulity: “Are you kidding me?? He just accepted the Queen's Gambit!"

Coda: What makes for intellectual humor?

Intellectual jokes, at their core, are jokes that teach you new ideas, or help you reconceive existing ideas in a new way.

My favorite forms of intellectual jokes/humor work on multiple levels: They’re accessible to those who just get the surface joke but rewards deeper knowledge with additional layers of meaning. In some of the best examples, the connection to insight is itself subtle, and not highlighted by a direct reference to the relevant academic fields.

There are two failures of attempts to do intellectual humor. They can fail to be intellectual, or they can fail to be funny. Of frequently cited attempts to do “intellectual” humor that fail to be intellectual, there are again two common forms: 1) they are about intellectuals as people, rather than about ideas, or 2) They’re about jargon, not ideas.

In both cases, the joke isn’t intellectual humor so much as “smart people jokes”: the humor rests on stereotypes, in-group solidarity, and the feeling of smartness that you get when you get a joke, but the joke does not actually teach you about new ideas, or help you reconceive of existing ideas in a new way.

Two examples come to mind:

Q: How do you tell if a mathematician is extroverted²?

A: When he’s talking to you, he stares at your shoes!

And

Q: What’s purple and commutes?

A: An Abelian³ grape.

If you were in my undergrad abstract algebra classes, the above jokes were the shit. For 20 year old math majors, they were hilarious. Nonetheless, they are not, by any reasonable definition of the term, intellectual.

Of course, a more common failure mode is that the jokes simply fail to be funny. I will not offer a treatise into what makes a joke funny. All unfunny jokes are alike in their unfunniness, but each funny joke is funny in its own way.

I hope you enjoyed this collection. If you'd like to discuss the deeper intellectual connections of any of these jokes, or if you have other intellectual jokes you like, please share in the comments below!

And if you liked my jokes and/or writing, consider sharing this post with at least one friend and subscribing to The Linchpin for more.

1. None of these jokes are original, though I worked hard on the phrasing and prefer my version to any other versions you can find online. Changes I’ve made can be as subtle as tightening the language a little, to as significant as varying the punchline, and/or adding a third layer of meaning. As is standard for collections of jokes, I do not cite my sources.

2. Note how you can replace “mathematician” with any stereotypically introverted field of study or profession and the joke works equally well.

3. Abelian groups commute. Yes, the entire joke is just a dumb pun, there’s nothing deeper to it.