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Questionable Humor

Many people find the act of explaining a joke to be violating some kind of unwritten law. Yes, when jokes are explained they are less funny than if you “get” them by yourself. But many of my jokes are intentionally opaque or obscure, so I don’t mind explaining one now and again.

In this case, if you’re not a sports fan you may not have ever heard the term I am illustrating above used in this context. So for those readers, I offer this: When a player is recovering from an injury or illness and management doesn’t know if they’ll be well enough by game time to play, they are listed in the press as “questionable”.

Moving on to the questions this “questionable” athlete is faced with answering, I had a fair amount of fun coming up with those. The one about Mandarin was inspired by my own experience trying to learn another language (Spanish) for the first time at the age of 60. Spanish is arguably much easier for a European/American than Mandarin would be—at least it uses the same alphabet—but in many instances, it might as well be Chinese. Or astrophysics or ancient Sumerian or barcodes from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Sure, it looks simple and even relatively uneducated people all over the world can speak it at 1000 miles per hour, but when you get into it you realize there’s more to it than you might think. For instance, there are over 700 words for “to be” depending on who is being (me, you, him, her, it, them, or us) whether they are being that now, in the past for a defined amount of time, in the past for a continual amount of time, in the past for a continual amount of time that goes into the present, in the future for a moment, in the future for a continuing amount of time that started in the present, in the future for sure, in the future maybe, in the future probably if some other things happen first, or if it could have happened in the past but didn’t and might happen in the future but no one thinks it really will. And each of those words changes completely depending on whether the thing you are “being” is temporary or a permanent feature of somebody or something. And if you use the wrong one, you may well be telling somebody you are permanently drunk or temporarily a man. This is why, even after three years of almost daily study, I am mostly relegated to pointing at things and saying, “me want” or “me no want”.

Which brings us to the second question in the cartoon above. The most commonly misunderstood statistic is one that I came to Mexico with three years ago: I am 100% going to one day be able to speak Spanish in a way that does not confuse and embarrass myself and/or the person(s) I am speaking to. That percentage gets adjusted downward daily and is still not completely understood.

I will leave the last question about cats for you to answer on your own.

What questionable cartoons was Wayno peddling last week? Let’s find out now…

Business in the front, five-year-old’s birthday party in the back. (Have mullets gone out of style? Those grotesque hairstyles and the whole baggy rodeo clown pants thing are fashions that I was once certain would quickly be eradicated like small pox, but I guess I was wrong. I blame the anti-vaxxers.)

I wore a cone collar when I got my vasectomy many years ago, to keep me from biting the stitches. The cone was uncomfortable but I saved a lot of money by asking a veterinarian friend to perform the procedure so it was worth it.

Holy mother of pearl, Batman. She’s got balls.

I could use a pet that can lift the entire house and carry it 100 miles.

Wayno’s weekly cartoon blog post has some interesting extras this week, along with a very cool story about him and Neil Innes, a musical comedy genius who worked extensively with Monty Python as well as many other personal projects. Go enjoy it, but don’t forget to come back for the rest of this nonsense.

Shown here in a scene from Escape From The New York Kennel Club Dog Show.

When George Washington gets stopped by a cop, he uses a one dollar bill.

This concludes our weekly trip down the water slide of humor. Thanks for getting wet with us, Jazz Pickles. If you like what we do and that we do it without ads or a paywall, please consider making a holiday donation to the Tip Jar or visiting some of the other links below. Every little bit helps to keep the chickens nesting in shredded Spanish books at Rancho Bizarro.

Until next time, be happy, be smart, be nice, and resist ignorance and Trumpism.

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