Title: Eye Doctor
General Information about Item:
- Joke
- English
- United States
Informant Data:
- Anthony Addo is a senior at Dartmouth College studying Computer Science. He was born in Connecticut but has lived in Ohio and Ghana, and currently lives in Ghana.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- The joke was collected on November 6th, 2017. Anthony first encountered the joke as it was told to him by a friend in his CS 1 class. His friend introduced this joke to Anthony to help “ease his nerves” since he was struggling with an assignment, and its relative simplicity makes it accessible to any English speaker who has heard of the programming languages Java and C#.
- Cultural Context
- The CS 1 course is the introductory computer science course at Dartmouth, and is often the first time students are exposed to the world of computer programming. This pun in particular makes use of the homonymous relationship between the name of the programming language C# (pronounced see-sharp) and the phrase “see sharp,” as in “seeing clearly.” It derives humor from an English pun on the letter “C” and the word “see” and doesn’t require any programming knowledge besides the fact that a language called C# exists, and is a properly simplistic and funny joke to share with an English-speaking student programmer feeling discouraged with an assignment.
Item:
Q: Why did the Java programmer go see the eye doctor?
A: Because he didn’t C#!
Transcript:
- Stephanie: Alright, could you give me your name and background please?
- Anthony: My name is Anthony Addo. I’m a Dartmouth ’18. Born in Hartford, Connecticut but also have lived in Ohio and Ghana.
- Stephanie: Alright, what’s your joke?
- Anthony: My joke, as a computer science is this joke. Why did the Java programmer go see the eye doctor? Because he didn’t C#! Badun tsss!
- Stephanie: Alright. Um, can you tell me where you first heard the joke, or who told it to you?
- Anthony: I first heard the joke in my CS1 class. I was doing some really really um, hard, Python, I was trying to make some sort of, um, planetary , motion. And it was really wracking my brain, so I asked my friend, just to help me out. The first thing he did was try to ease my nerves by telling me this joke. I laughed. Well, I chuckled. But it was good.
- Stephanie: Alright, and can you explain why it’s funny?
- Anthony: Absolutely. So in computer science you have many languages. Java isn’t coffee, its actually a language. So java is one language, and C# is also a language as well. So “C#” is actually a pun on “seeing sharp”!
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Collector’s Name: Stephanie Guo
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. English. Eye Doctor. Java. C#.