Engineering humor

My material for classes with engineering students doesn't usually involve intentional humor, but after coming across various "engineer jokes" on the internet, I shared some of them with my students. It was not only a nice break during the lesson, but it also started discussions about aspects of engineering and/or cultural aspects of humor.

One of the first engineer jokes I remember hearing was:

• An optimist says the glass is half full, a pessimist says the glass is half empty, and an engineer says the glass is twice as big as it has to be.

Do cultures other than English-language ones have the concept of the half-full (optimist) and half-empty (pessimist) glass? What are the different concepts that different cultures joke about - or would not joke about?

To bring some of these questions into lessons, I searched the internet for jokes specifically about engineers or engineering, and it turns out there are a lot of them! The first article I focused on was "25 Best Engineering Jokes That Will Make Your Day Better," written by Christopher McFadden on the website interestingengineering.com (see my Relevant Links):

https://interestingengineering.com/25-best-engineering-jokes-make-your-day-better

Which jokes could be translated into students' language(s) and which are dependent on English language or English-culture ideas? For example, jokes that depend on puns for their humor cannot be directly translated into another language. One of the engineering jokes in the article puns with the words four and for and with what and watt:

• Customer: Do you have any two-watt, 4-volt bulbs?
• Sales Rep: For what?
• Customer: No, two.
• Sales Rep: Two what?
• Customer: Yes.
• Sales Rep: No.

Some jokes require certain technical knowledge to understand why it's intended to be funny. One joke in particular, referred to as "the most brilliant joke ever written," I didn't understand at all until my students explained it to me:

• One day, Einstein, Newton, and Pascal meet up and decide to play a game of "hide and seek." Einstein volunteered to go first. As he counted, Pascal ran away scrambling to find a great hiding place. Giddily, he squeezed into a crawl space sure that he would win this time, as this was his best hiding spot to date and Newton surely wouldn't find an equal. Newton, on the other hand, stood right in front of Einstein, pulled out a piece of chalk, and drew a box on the ground of roughly 1x1 meters. Once this was completed, he sat down neatly inside the box and waited for Einstein to finish counting. When Einstein opened his eyes, he of course saw Newton and with a bit of disappointment said, "I found you, Newton, you lose." But Newton repliced, "On the contrary, you are looking at one Newton over a square meter. Pascal loses!"

If you don't understand the reason this is funny, I have given the reason at the end of this post.

There are links to other websites with engineering jokes, and many of them are the same as in this article. What is interesting about the language is that there are certain "templates" to jokes in English that can be seen throughout the choices. Some examples from the jokes in this article:

• An X, a Y and a Z (verb) ...
• A priest, a doctor and an engineer were waiting ...
• An engineer, a statistician and a physicist are out hunting ...
• Or, a variant: Three Xs were (verb)
• Three engineering students were gathered together discussing ...
• Why did the X (verb)?
• Why did the engineering students leave class early?
• Why does the Polish airline have ...?
• How many Xs does it take to change a lightbulb?
• How many nuclear engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
• What's the difference between an X and a Y?
• What's the difference between an introverted and an extroverted engineer?

One of the jokes is a cartoon from the website XKCD, which I referred to in my post of June 7, 2013, titled Cartoons for ESL. The website is still current - and funny. Using humor in lessons can be an interesting change, and it breaks the stereotype of engineers as being humorless!

* Because 1 Pascal = 1 Newton/m2