Title: Recursion

General Information about Item:

• Joke
• English
• United States

Informant Data:

• James Sylvia is a Dartmouth ’19. He majors in Government. He took both CS 1 and ENGS 20, both of which are programming courses. He is most familiar with Python and C, but also has some small experience with Matlab. He grew up in Massachusetts.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context
  • This joke would be shared between computer scientists or others familiar with programming, or just the concept of recursion. Age should not be relevant to whether or not this joke would come up.

• Cultural Context
  • This joke highlights the inherent paradox presented by a recursive function, a commonly used technique in programming. The recursive function depends upon itself to operate and therefore can not work unless it has already worked before. In reality this is not a paradox as typically a conditional enables the function to run the first time without calling itself. Not doing this however can create what is called an infinite loop, which is problematic. Regardless, the paradoxical nature inherent to the recursive function provides humor through its own absurdity.

Item:

To understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

Transcription:

• Robert: Could you please give your name and background?
• James: My name is James. I am a ’19. I am a government major and I took a both CS 1 and ENGS 20, two programming courses, at Dartmouth..
• Robert: Could you please tell your joke?
• James: To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
• Robert: Could you please tell me where you heard this joke?
• James: I first heard it in my CS 1 class.
• Robert: Could you briefly explain the joke?
• James: The basis of the joke is that a recursive function calls itself. This means it can only function correctly if the function it calls, itself, already functions correctly.

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

Collector’s Name: Robert Sylvia

Tags/Keywords:

• Joke. Programming. Recursion. Syntax.