Title: Electron Pun

General Information about Item:

• Genre and Sub Genre: Verbal Folklore: Joke/Pun

• Language: English

• Country where Item is from: United States

Informant Data:

• David Domonoske is a sophomore at Dartmouth College. He is a member of the alpine ski team, and hails from Park City, Utah. He plans on majoring in engineering, and staying for an additional year to pursue the bachelor of engineering degree. As a sophomore he hasn’t taken many engineering classes yet, as he has had to fulfill the numerous prerequisites. I interviewed Dave at Thayer on 11/3/17.

Contextual Data:

• Social/Cultural Context: According to the informant, this joke would normally only be told between engineers, or someone with a background in the sciences, as some knowledge of the changing charge of atoms is required to understand the joke/pun and actually find it funny. Specifically, one would have to know that when an atom loses a negatively charged electron, the atom’s charge would change from neutral to positive. The informant said the joke is generally told between friends as a form of entertainment, which is the setting he first heard it in.  He says he has since passed it along to a couple of people in his engineering classes.

Item:

• The item is a joke that the informant says is shared amongst engineering students at Dartmouth. The joke is a play on words, or pun, in which the word positive is used in a way where it could mean two things at once. It could either mean that the atom is positively charged, or that the atom is certain he lost an electron. This double meaning is the foundation for the joke’s humor.
• Two atoms are walking down the street, and one says,“Wait, wait, stop. I’ve lost an electron somewhere.The second one says, “Wait, are you sure?”To which the first one says, “Yes. I’m positive.”

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

• Electron Joke

Transcript of Associated File:

• Two atoms are walking down the street, and one says,

“Wait, wait, stop. I’ve lost an electron somewhere.”

The second one says, “Wait, are you sure?”

To which the first one says, “Yes. I’m positive.

 

Informant’s Comments:

• Dave said that he thinks the joke is kind of nerdy and lame, but that’s really where the joke derives its humor. People normally laugh at the simplicity of the joke instead of the cleverness of the pun itself.

Collector’s Comments:

• This joke seems to be a stereotypical lame science joke, where the actual content of the joke is so nerdy, that people laugh at it. But, it seems as though the joke is necessarily contained within a certain group of people, as its humor requires certain scientific knowledge. It appears important that this joke is transmitted in English, or another language that has a word with the same double meaning, as the joke relies upon the dual meaning of the word positive, as it can either mean that you are sure of something, or it can refer to a number greater than zero. I assume that this isn’t necessarily the case with other languages, which would cause the joke to lose its meaning upon translation.

Collector’s Name: Alexander Sullivan

Tags/Keywords:

• Verbal Folklore, Joke, Pun