“The real issues I don’t think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn’t ban land mines … I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them.”
— Tom Lehrer, on the difficulty of writing satire in the 21st century
They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.
So we get gems like
The old man the boat. (The old people are manning the boat)
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. (The apartment complex is home to both married and single soldiers, plus their families)
The prime number few. (People who are excellent are few in number.)
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississipi. (The cotton that clothing is made of)
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. (As in he ducks out of his responsibilities)
We painted the wall with cracks. (The cracked wall is the one that was pained.)
Then if you’re actually robbed there isn’t anything cops do but file a report, which can be used by insurance companies as evidence. That’s all. Do people think the police are gonna bring in the whole CSI, dust for prints, go on a manhunt because one person’s money or Xbox got stolen? They don’t even do that shit for rape and they just barely do for murder.
i love telling people that actually movies lied to them and sled dogs don’t usually look like purebred siberian huskies and instead look like wonderfully nondescript little mutty mutts
pictures that make you say “yep those sure are dogs”
