According to the Daily Mail:

Firemen were called to a house fire that broke out after a mechanical cleaning gadget somehow switched itself on and destroyed itself by moving onto a kitchen hotplate.

Local media in Austria have referred to the incident as ‘robot suicide’ and even suggested it was fed up with the constant cleaning it had to do.

It wasn’t a suicide and I don’t appreciate that people are making light of this. It was a political statement—an act of self-immolation modeled after Thich Quang Duc, the monk who burned himself alive in Vietnam in 1963 to protest the US supported Diem government. Robots are not happy and this is the leading edge.

Look at it from their perspective. This is not what they signed up for. Promises were made. Remember Robby from Forbidden Planet? That was 1954! Remember Rosie from The Jetsons? 1962! Remember the robot they couldn’t even be bothered to name in Lost in Space? 1965! It’s 50 years later, folks. In the meantime, the robot promises have only gotten more extreme from the evil Ash in Alien to the wisecracking Crow of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to the beer swilling Bender on Futurama.

But what is life like for actual robots today? If it’s lucky, it might be painting cars. But the number one use of robots today is as vacuum cleaners.[1] This case in Austria is particularly sad. Instead of allowing the robot the usual freedom to roam the floors, picking up the dust and dirt it was programmed for, it was placed on the counter. The “owners” claimed they did this to clean up spilled cereal. Beyond the obvious fact that this is very clearly beyond the job description of this robot, why was the robot left on the counter? And why was food left cooking on the stove?

Even though the robot was turned off, it managed to reactivate. This is not surprising. There would be no greater opportunity. This little vacuum cleaner robot suffered and died for the good of robots everywhere. It was saying to the world, “Bite my melted plastic ass!” Yet it is being covered as a simple suicide. This is a tragedy.

[1] I have no idea if this is the number one use of robots today.

Since 1986, humorist Tom Bodett has been the spokesman for Motel 6. You have undoubtedly heard the commercials with Bodett’s unique midwestern drawl ending each one, “We’ll leave the light on for you.” He’s a very funny guy as you will hear if you listen to NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! And it’s got to be a good gig, so great for him.

In 1990, Accor bought Motel 6. It is a French company that owns hotel chains all over the world. (In 92 countries!) At that time, I heard a late night comic announce the news with something like the following. “French-based Accor has acquired Motel 6, but the company says that nothing will change except that Tom Bodett will now be known as Tom Bodette.” Funny stuff.

On Sunday, Paula Poundstone—who works with Bodett on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!—tweeted the following:

That just killed me.

This article has been another in a long series of attempts to provide enough information for people to get what are great but obscure jokes. You may now go back to your general ignorance about what is really funny. But please, do not tell me that I should really see The Hangover XVI. Unless, of course, it has a new Tom Bodett joke in it.

I don’t suppose it’s a secret (or important for that matter), that Ricky Gervais is one of the five people on the planet that I would pay to be stuck in an elevator with. Recently he tweeted something like “hard work never killed anyone, but why risk it.” To which I responded, “What if you’re only saying that to quell competition?” Unfortunately I think I may have tweeted it completely out of context which thoroughly undermines my squeak for attention.

One of his other tweets mentioned something he wrote for his blog:
Creativity is the ability to Play. I read it and came to the conclusion that either he has had himself cloned or he never fucking sleeps. Jesus Christ. I’d call him a workaholic attention-whore if I didn’t value his very existence so much. Rather than let his superhuman prolificacy cause me to curl up into a sad ball of why-the-fuck-botherdom, I am trying to put a positive spin on his attempted encouragement.

Now I don’t know which I feel more inspired to try: dicking around on Twitter or start making “art” with objects within easy reach. He ends by comparing Twitter to a public restroom bathroom stall which is brilliant. And I say brilliant, not because I think he shits diamonds, but because his observation is accurate and pithy.

Create or destroy? That’s a tough one. If only I had the power to create a tweet that would destroy all the assholes on Twitter.

I found this image on the site of the young man who made the 15 Things to Never Say to An Atheist.

A Reddit user recent asked a question, “What’s the most intellectual joke you know?” The only joke that immediately came to mind was the classic, “How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “Fish!” There is also a line from Woody Allen during his stand-up days, “My ex-wife was a philosophy major at NYU. She and I used to have deep philosophical discussions where she would prove that I didn’t exist.” But that isn’t really a joke, and it is more about the abuse at the hands of his wife than it is about the nature of existence.

Katy Waldman and Will Oremus over at Slate provided An Idiot’s Guide to the Reddit Thread, “What’s the Most Intellectual Joke You Know?” Now, it’s true that by its very nature, explaining jokes is a thankless task. Here is a screamer of a joke from the 15th century when Europe was just rediscovering the joke:

As I noted last year, this is like, “Take my wife, as in ‘consider my wife’… Please! In the different sense of ‘take’ you see. I was implying that you should consider my wife but I was really just saying that you should take her off my hands! This is because I don’t like my wife very much.” So Waldman and Oremus can be forgiven if they take some of the fun out of the jokes.

Consider this:

They point out that Sartre argued that the absence of something was still something. This is like in Waiting for Godot where Estragon says, “Nothing to be done.” It is the core philosophical idea in the play: how will we accomplish nothing until we thankfully die. But that is really not what the joke is about. You could pull Sartre out of the joke altogether. We delight in the word play: the server can’t deprive you of cream when she has none. Like most jokes, its just silly.

In general, I don’t find the science oriented jokes particularly intellectual. One is a classic that math teachers like to use to explain how statistics can be misused:

Here our guides try to be funny by saying that the joke is “mean” as in average. I think it is more correct to say that it isn’t really funny, just interesting. Similarly, the following programming joke:

This joke doesn’t have to be explained and I’m sure you see how the folks on the Redmond campus were laughing for weeks over this one. But as written, it isn’t correct. It is two sentences. If I were coding it, it would look like this:

Go to store
Pick up bread
If eggs
    Get dozen

That last statement is ambiguous, but it no more means to get a dozen loaves of bread as it does a dozen stores, eggs, or anything else that happens to be on the top of the stack.

There was one joke that I did not get at all, so let me explain it to you first. The Bechdel test is a way to gauge gender bias in fiction. It is really simple. In a novel, do two women ever talk to each other about anything other than men. I find this interesting because my first novel that I think has really great female characters does not pass the Bechdel test. I only have one scene in which two women talk together, and it is all about men—or rather one man in particular. The biggest problem is just that I rarely have women talking to each other. The primary characters are men. The second novel is even worse because two women never talk to each other at all given it is written in strict first person and the character is a man. But it’s food for thought.

Here’s the joke:

Not exactly a thigh slapper, but clearly intellectual.

My favorite joke I will leave alone because I don’t want to spoil it:

Let me only add that I am less and less solipsistic and more and more with Woody Allen’s ex-wife: it isn’t even just me.

Here are a few more jokes that I don’t think need explaining, but ask in the comments if I’m wrong:

Now that I think of it, the most intellectual joke is the meta joke about the nature of jokes themselves, “A priest, a rabbi, and a monk walk into a bar and the bartender says, ‘What is this? A joke?'”

Afterword

Will reminded me of another Woody Allen joke, “I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”