Monday, August 24, 2015

Stop Me If You've Heard This One (Originally Posted 2012)



Fig 2
Fig. 1
So there's these three guys in a plane, and one's a pediatrician, one's a doctor, and one's a lawyer, and the pilot comes back and says, wait a minute, the first one's an osteopath, it's funnier that way, and the pilot comes back and says they're going down and they'll have to jump except there's just one parachute, so the osteopath says, wait a minute, I think there have to be at least two parachutes because otherwise it wouldn't be as funny because, well, anyway, the pilot says there's two parachutes, but that doesn't make sense either, because the pilot needs a parachute, or he wouldn't be so calm, or maybe the pilot says there's three parachutes but he's wearing one of them - that's the ticket! - or he says there's three parachutes and the osteopath says well that should be plenty because that's the sort of thing an osteopath would point out, and the pilot says but I'm already wearing one of them, so it's pretty clear one of you will have to jump, and the osteopath says, one thing they taught us in osteopath school is I can't remember just what the osteopath says he learned in osteopath school, but it's just as well because he's been getting all the good lines anyway and it's not his joke, so just to recap, the pilot comes back and says he can't be bothered to count them right now, but however many parachutes there are, there's one too few, and the osteopath says something he learned in osteopath school about self-sacrifice and nobly jumps out of the plane to a certain death which I say good riddance because that osteopath was nothing but trouble and I should've gone with the pediatrician in the first place, but the pilot says we're still going down, and someone else is going to have to jump, and the lawyer says what the hell, I thought we were only one parachute short, and the pilot says, oh, by the way, when I say jump, I mean jump without a parachute, but the lawyer says I thought we had enough after the osteopath left, and the pilot says, no, I must've miscounted, because we're still one short, and the pediatrician says we're only talking about two or three parachutes here and it's not exactly long division, and the pilot says, look, make up your mind who's going jump because that's the whole point of the story, and the lawyer says this isn't going to work because the punchline is when I throw the doctor out, but we need one more person to voluntarily leap to his death after a making a noble sentiment so we can build suspense, and the doctor, who doesn't like where this is heading says, well, maybe there's another passenger around here, if you keep miscounting the parachutes, maybe you miscounted passengers too, so they look around and can't find any more passengers, and the doctor says to the pilot, take off your parachute for a second, I want to check something about the straps, and the pilot says I'm not falling for that one, and the lawyer says, we might as well get this over with, and says the one thing they taught me at the American Bar Association is, and hell I can't remember what it was, but it was really funny in context, maybe about putting other people first and he throws the doctor overboard which isn't nearly as surprising as I meant it to be and then the pilot looks around and says damn, I think we had enough parachutes after all, and come to think of it, the plane's not going down, and we'll be in Phoenix in an hour.