I have two jokes in my repertoire. I've been telling the following since I was a kid.
Me: How many elephants can you fit in a mattabooboo?
Unsuspecting person in the wrong place at the right time: What's a mattabooboo?
Me: Nothing Yogi.
Yeah, it probably wasn't even funny when I was six (except that people pretend to laugh at kid jokes) but Yogi Bear references are clearly not funny now. Especially when the listener responds, "I don't know. How many?" D'oh.
Why can't I remember more jokes? Well, thanks to the New York Times, I now know and the reason smacks of an audible "duh."
Our brains are programmed to remember patterns. This is why we can sing along to the ABCs but would have difficulty remembering any other sequence of 26 letters. Jokes, by their very nature, veer off sharply from what's expected. (Otherwise, they wouldn't be funny.) As such, it's inherent in my little brain's functionality to forget the punchline. The pattern is disrupted.
I feel so much better about myself now.
In a nice twist, this research also confirms why I often did well on exams in college after not studying, attending class or even buying the books. I would study with others, listen to them chatting about the subject matter and put key points in lyric form to songs that I knew. If luck was on my side, the answers (and songs) would come back to me during the test.
I even remember the title of one such song, Behind Mud Walls, which was sung to the tune of Charlie Rich's Behind Closed Doors and helped me ace an anthropology exam. Given that I had time left at the end of the test, I wrote the whole song for my professor on the back of my test. Brownie points!
I took an IQ test and I flunked it of course,
I can't spell VW but I got a Porsche
'Cause I'm a blonde, B-L-I-N-D
'Cause I'm a blonde, don't you wish you were me?
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