“Eight bytes walk into a bar…”

Item:

“Eight bytes walk into a bar.  The bartender asks, “Can I get you anything?”

“Yeah,” reply the bytes.  “Make us a double.””

General Information about Item:

  • Oral Folklore: joke
  • English
  • USA

Informant Data:

Arun Hari is a Dartmouth computer science major, in the class of 2019, from Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

Contextual Data:

The informant first heard this joke from a friend in his high school computer science class. He would tell this joke to his fellow programmer classmates, typically when he is doing problem sets with his peers and wants to lighten the mood with a novel spin on the classic “walk into a bar” joke.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Eight bytes walks into a bar…

Informant’s Comments:

A byte is a unit of information. So a double is anything with a decimal point in it. To store a double on the computer, you need 8 bytes of information.

Collector’s Comments:

This joke can be classified as verbal folklore. Furthermore, one can identify this joke as a form of riddle because it incorporates a comparison between a “double” in terms of alcohol, which is essentially two times the amount of alcohol, and a “double” in computer science terms, which is a reference to numbers containing a decimal point.

Tags/Keywords:

  • jokes, bytes, double

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