synonym jokes

[Lynne Murphy]

OK, I think I have to restate--I'm looking for jokes with a couple of
synonyms in them.  A joke with a polyseme or homonym (i.e., a word with two
meanings) is not what I'm looking for.  I'm looking for jokes where two
words have one meaning.

Sorry to have clogged up the list with this...

Lynne

--On Tuesday, March 20, 2001 8:26 pm +0000 "James A. Landau"
<JJJRLandau at AOL.COM> wrote:

> Are you looking for things like "The greatest cause of automobile
> accidents is the nut that holds the wheel"?
>
> While the preceding is clean, words that can refer to certain parts of the
> human anatomy, e.g. "nuts", "ass", "balls", are particularly susceptible
> to off-color synonym jokes.  Just one example: "ball-bearing mousetrap: a
> tomcat".  (This one I am told was invented by a science fiction writer
> named George O. Smith for the purpose of sneaking something off-color
> past a notoriously puritanical editor named Kay Tarrant (assistant editor
> for many years of Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog))).
>
> Somebody put a lengthy concatenation of double-entendres involving the
> word "ass" on this list recently (I think I kept a copy, if you can't
> locate it.)
>
> A man whose name I recall as Kermit Schaefer published a number of
> collections of radio and TV "bloopers", which include such things as
> "Howard Johnson's is the best place on the turnpike to eat and get gas."
>
> A Canadian politician whose name I failed to note said that if a
> homosexual Governor-General were to be appointed, then his partner would
> be the "Queen's queen's queen".
>
>                         - Jim Landau



M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320