This post doesn’t have much to do with good writing, but I happen to like jokes that relate to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The gist of the theorem is that he proved mathematically that you can’t have a complete logical system, one that doesn’t have unanswerable questions and has no contradictions. This was much to his colleague Bertrand Russell’s displeasure, who was in the midst of writing a book (Principia Mathematica) to prove the completeness of mathematics. Here’s a link to a joke about that:
It’s the second one, but they’re all funny if you know a little math.
Okay, that’s a lot of preliminaries to get to the joke in the comic Dog Eat Doug that I had in mind in the first place. Part of Gödel’s proof hinged on the fact that when something refers to itself, you can get into trouble.
Interesting bit of onomatopoeia there, too. I dare you to try this question on Siri.
PS–since it happened to come up, here’s a link to an article that actually mentions the incompleteness theorem:
The mathematics of Christmas: A review of the Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus