Funny sign or unfunny?

[PatrickG]

Okay... So I saw a sign today at a grocery store. It read:

"PORK BONE IN
LOIN
HEAD LETTUCE"

So I dashed off a quick message to about five friends.

The guys were all, like, "Lol! NO WAY!" or "*chuckle* No mystique in that one."

The one girl I sent the message to, who I know to be a fan of the single entendre, was like, "I don't get it." Which kind of shocked me because she was always big on leaving the dirtiest messages on our refrigerator at the old apartment.

Maybe you need to have an inner 14 year-old boy to find it funny or maybe you need to have my accompanying mental images of a lonely produce manager putting the sign up (with all the N's inexplicably backwards) or somebody with tourettes shouting every other word in an uncanny Jerry Lewis impression.

It's hours later and I still smirk when I picture it.

[Paradox]

I get it, but it's a stretch.

[PatrickG]

I'm not sure if it's hard to get or a stretch though (unless I'm missing something).

It's just a sign where over half the words are crude euphemisms.

I also find the scene in the movie Idiocracy to be crudely hilarious where we see a Fuddruckers burger restaurant morph over the centuries into a Buttfuckers burger restaurant.

It's just... so blatant.

Then again, about half of my practical jokes in the last decade have centered around trying to convince people that Bill Cosby has a Ph.D in Jell-O and Pudding research. (This isn't the funny part. The funny part is watching people talk about it after they buy into it.) I may have started an urban legend that cigarettes are not cancerous if you never smoke the last one in the pack. (This one managed to spread for over a hundred mile radius. I felt bad once I met strangers on the other side of the state repeating what I'd said word for word about how the last cigarette absorbs all the harmful nicotine and the only people who die are the ones who smoke the last one in the pack.) I held a rubber chicken hostage (I actually stapled it to a door, threatening that the next chicken won't be so lucky). I convinced someone to order a Fellatio at Starbucks. And I held a (stolen) garden gnome hostage. I had one WAAAY back where I rigged a computer to emanate a sound that only one person in the room could hear just to drive him nuts.

And fairly simple, slapstick-minded people "get it". And then, I occasionally run into some deranged person who is able to explain my own entire deranged thought process back to me (How could a chicken BE any less lucky than a dead chicken stapled to a door -- that isn't even real to begin with? Being a fake dead chicken with a staple in your neck is the apex of unluckiness for a chicken!)

I'm not sure if there's anything to get here aside from almost every word having a sexual cannotation though.

It's like how the children's menu at Red Lobster used to have "FUCK" hidden into the word search twelve times and "SEX" hidden in there eight or nine times. I was so proud of my hostesses the day they discovered that. I have no clue if the person who made that word search was a disgruntled person at corporate or just some unlucky schlub... But we kept that one posted quietly by the phone at the podium for a week or two until management called corporate and had that menu pulled.

[Huh?]

I don't get it. Is it just that there are a lot of words there that have sexual meanings? If that is the whole joke I say it isn't funny.

[PatrickG]

I don't get it. Is it just that there are a lot of words there that have sexual meanings? If that is the whole joke I say it isn't funny.

I dunno. Maybe you have to be a stunted person to find it funny.

It's like the church sign I saw that said, "The most important part of God's plan is on the other side of this board" and then it actually had a Bible quote on the other side. It was SO CLOSE to being epic hilarity had somebody actually put that on both sides.

[Rik Levins]

I also find the scene in the movie Idiocracy to be crudely hilarious where we see a Fuddruckers burger restaurant morph over the centuries into a Buttfuckers burger restaurant.

Never saw the movie. But my ex used to refer to that restaurant as "MotherFuckers".



I convinced someone to order a Fellatio at Starbucks.

Heh. And my brother got his wife-to-be to order a Dingleberry sundae at an ice cream shop. Amazingly, she ended up marrying him anyway.


I had one WAAAY back where I rigged a computer to emanate a sound that only one person in the room could hear just to drive him nuts..

Yep. I swapped speakers with another guy, who was working on the other side of the room from me, and spent the next couple of hours driving him crazy by having "his" computer keep making random weird noises.
Especially fart noises.

[Paradox]

Yes, there are a bunch of double entendre words there. The stretch is putting them together to make any kind of meaningful joke...or even sentence. You really have to be trying.

[Paradox]

Rik Levins likes stealth humor:

Yep. I swapped speakers with another guy, who was working on the other side of the room from me, and spent the next couple of hours driving him crazy by having "his" computer keep making random weird noises.
Especially fart noises.

Now THAT'S comedy! :biggrin:

[PatrickG]

Ooh! I just thought of a good one.

Send a box full of pudding, rigged to ooze out, to someone with a clear label that reads, "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL FEBRUARY 30th".

God. I must have watched too much 60s Batman as a child. 2 hours straight, almost every day, plus marathons. Plus growing up pouring over those Dick Sprang comics.

No wonder I've always felt that I needed a pennyfarthing bicycle, neon zoot suits, a crooked room to pace and think in and oversized working props of things like tv remotes, telephones and typewriters. (I managed to get the TV remote but I've put off those oversized phones for years.)

EDIT: By the way, I have seen crooked rooms or optical illusion rooms at funhouses, gallery exhibits, tourist traps and museums. And believe me, I don't want to leave once I get in. As a child, I decided I wanted a house with perfectly round rooms or a house that was intentionally crooked or a small shack sitting atop an enormous bunker. I read some stuff that suggested that the first two were found to mentally unhinge people in some crackpot studies but that just made me want them more.

[thespianphryne]

It's a question of context. Carpentry and construction is full of terms that might be construed as sexual and when in carpenter mode I don't really think about these things. But out of context, I'm still 12 years old

Eg.
http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m262/phryneateleusis/CBR/SCREWPAKT-1.gif

[CutterMike]

(...)
EDIT: By the way, I have seen crooked rooms or optical illusion rooms at funhouses, gallery exhibits, tourist traps and museums. And believe me, I don't want to leave once I get in. As a child, I decided I wanted a house with perfectly round rooms or a house that was intentionally crooked or a small shack sitting atop an enormous bunker. I read some stuff that suggested that the first two were found to mentally unhinge people in some crackpot studies but that just made me want them more.

You're not the only one, Patrick...

I never thought "bunker" per se, but I have always wanted an earth-sheltered home dug into the side of a hill, with one side open and facing out and down the hill, but with the access from the OTHER side of the hill, leading up to the entrance which is, yes, a small shack sitting at the top.

[Cam63]

Tell me this is a coincidence...

http://www.rapidfiredreams.com/media/HP-KU-EA.jpg

...and I'll call you a damn liar.

[Solaris]

Tell me this is a coincidence...

http://www.rapidfiredreams.com/media/HP-KU-EA.jpg

...and I'll call you a damn liar.


I LOL'd on that one!!!

One of my favorite things is signage where they messed something up and didn't notice.

(And Patrick, I'm with Dox on the market thing: sure, I got it that all of 'em were sexual innuendos... but didn't immediately find a way to make 'em funny. Then again, my brain kept *trying* to find ways to connect them into a dirty funny phrase, so it gets points for that. :wink: )

One of my favorites was from a fiction book about a tiny rural town. The "diner grill that's been there for years" was trying to boost their sales and attract the summer tourists (they already had a loyal local clientele).

So the owner springs for a new awning over the door, printed by the local sign company. After debating for days, he picked his slogan, got it printed, and hung it up out front... only to have his loyal patrons and folks from businesses across the way all stand out front and laugh their asses off. It seems there was a minor typo. The sign read,

"Eat Here And You'll Be Regular."

Amazing what happens when you leave out one little "A".

:biggrin:

One of my favorite RL signs was a Church one:

"Thinking about Suicide? Let the Church Help!"

And Patrick reminded me of a billboard to promote pork... big picture of a guy grilling pork chops, lovely blonde at his side. Words:

Pork.
Your Friends.

I don't know what else it said, because I stopped reading right there and cracked up.

[Alan Lynch]

Innuendo is possibly the greatest form of humour in the world.

[PatrickG]

One of my favorite RL signs was a Church one:

"Thinking about Suicide? Let the Church Help!"



Reminds me of my favorite sign of all time:

"I lost 40 pounds. Call for free samples!"