BIGpedia - Meta-joke - Encyclopedia and Dictionary Online

Meta-joke may refer to three somewhat different, but related categories: "self-referring jokes", "jokes about jokes" (see meta-), and "joke templates".

Contents

1 Self-referring joke

2 Joke about jokes

3 Joke template

4 See Also

Self-referring joke

This kind of meta-joke is a joke in which the joke itself, or, rather, a certain category of joke, is part of the joke.

Examples of meta-jokes are:

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi are walking down the street.

The rabbi says, "Hey, did you hear the one about us?"

An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar.

The bartender turns to them, takes one look, and says "What is this - some kind of a joke?"

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Boo.

Boo who?

Don't cry; it's only a knock-knock joke.

In this sense, the usage of the term "meta" is similar to that in meta-reference.

Joke about jokes

The humour in a slight variation of meta-jokes relies on some other, different class or classes of jokes.

A newlywed couple, a blind man, an Iranian mullah, a chicken, a used car dealer, Judith Regan, a proctologist, and a Hollywood starlet, along with a nun, a man who just received a gorilla brain transplant, two Hassidic Jews, a stuttering hotel clerk, and a can of Spam are riding in a compact car.

Suddenly, they hear a siren and a state trooper motions the vehicle to pull over. "License and registration," says the cop, "you've exceeded the legal character limit in this joke."

Some of them string together a whole bunch of well-known jokes so that in fact the joke starts to resemble shaggy dog story.

Here "meta" is used to describe the fact that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the word metadata (data about data).

Joke template

This kind of meta-joke of a sarcastic jab at the fact that some jokes are endlessly refitted to different circumstances or characters without significant innovation in the humor.

Three people of different nationalities walk into the bar. Two of them say something smart, and the third one makes a mockery of his fellow countrymen by acting dumb.

Here, "meta" is used as in mathematics (like in the term metamathematics) to refer to the fact that each of these abstracts over a large class of jokes.