A Pint of Milk and a Dozen Eggs

Title: A Pint of Milk and a Dozen Eggs

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Ulf Österberg has been a engineering professor at Dartmouth College since 1989. He teaches classes such as ENGS 23, Distributed Systems and Fields and ENGS 26, Control Theory. He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and lived in Sweden until after he had earned his PhD in optics.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: Jokes were not common in classroom settings at the schools the informant attended, but he strongly believes that jokes are helpful for keeping students engaged and makes an effort to tell jokes such as this one in his classes. This joke makes fun of how the technical mind of an engineer might interpret a statement like a computer, without thinking about whether it makes sense.
Social Context: This joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. This joke was specifically intended to be told to students when it was relevant to the class. Telling jokes helps to connect students to the class and to the professor. The informant heard this joke from another professor at Dartmouth.

Item:

Interview Recording:

Transcript of joke:

(8:44) “The wife of an engineer says to her husband, ‘when you come home tonight, can you go by the grocery store and pick up a pint of milk and if they have eggs, pick up a dozen,’ and he comes home in the evening with twelve pints of milk, and she goes ‘why did you buy twelve pints of milk,’ and he says, ‘because they had eggs.'”

Informant’s Comments:

The informant said he grew up telling jokes in Sweden, but he had difficulty learning how to tell jokes and especially puns in English.

Collector’s Comments:

The informant was my professor for ENGS 26, Control Theory, this semester, and he told this joke in class. I have also heard this joke in the past with the protagonist being a computer scientist instead of an engineer.

Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive