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Textbook Humor
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Modern academic textbooks represent a curious duality. On the one hand, people expect them to be a clear, accurate and legitimate explication of the topics contained therein. It is expected that they are written by intelligent scholars with a clear grasp of the information, and the expected seriousness of the learning environment tends to lend an air of sobriety to the proceedings. On the other hand, many intelligent people are snarky goofs, and one of the main target audiences for these books is the snarky goofs of tomorrow. It is a bit of textbook prose, often appearing in the homework problems, that, while being entirely legitimate, suggests that the author doesn't mind a little breeziness in the discussion of the material, or at least recognizes the difficulty of immediate application of some of the concepts involved. A variant of this trope involves jokes sneaked into original research papers. Discovering one of these is almost guaranteed hilarity, and often subject to Memetic Mutation inside the classroom. Related to Edutainment Show and Easter Eggs. Problems will be left unanswered as an exercise for the reader. |
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Another one shows a stock picture of a wolf-man and a woman hugging. "A date between a teen guy and a girl, as seen by the girl's father." | |
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An Introduction to Language, 9th Edition by Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams has some rather odd sample sentences. The best is an example of sentence structure in the form of a mild (and inaccurate) Deathly Hallows spoiler: "The girl Professor Snape loved married the man of her dreams". | |
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| Textbook Humor / int_242a6694 | type |
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The Cambridge Latin Course is full of innuendos. Cambridge Latin students will single each other out by yelling, "Grumio ancillam delectat!" ("Grumio pleases the slave-girl.") Then there are places just asking for high school Latin students to yell "Oh, is that what they're calling it now?!" ("And then he had a three hour conversation with Agricola...") Not to mention the story of Amicus, the friend of the main family who spends his time staring at statues of nude young men with his hand in his toga and putting his arm around Quintus, a teenager, who looks vaguely uncomfortable at this turn of events. There are also some stories that are just funny, like the one where Clemens sets a sacred cat on some mobsters who are trying to run him out of business (and the guy runs a pottery store), or the one where Quintus saves Clemens and Grumio from a mad dog by running up and punching it in the face. |
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Speaking of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), another part of the Theme Tune is rephrased in terms of conditional clauses in a looping construct. The use of an "else" clause with "unless" likely plays on the double negative of "don't cut no slack." | |
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In the second World of Warcraft Chronicle compendium, the index contains an entry that reads "dreadlord - see Jaina Proudmoore" note This is a deliberate joke, as neither Jaina nor any specific dreadlords ever actually appear within the text. It should also be noted that the "proper" Jaina entry in the index cites page 404, in a book that only has 202 pages. | |
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Xanthippic Dialogues is interspersed with suble zingers (including one to Russell's love life — apparently he got nothing on Hegel), but the cherry on top has to be the index, filled to the brim with shout-outs, non-sequiturs and author's opinions ("The Common Law, God's gift for the English"). That's because the book only pretends to be a lost text, now found and critically published. | |
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The same also mentions the imaginary hydrocarbons "entane" and "orctane" in the section on simple distillation. "Presumably entane and orctane exist only in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, where they are used for fuel by ents and orcs respectively." (Best of all: the ents and orcs did have distinctive drinks that no one else knew how to make!) | |
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Ionesco's distinct style of absurdism owes a great deal to the innate weirdness of learning a foreign language from textbooks. The Bald Soprano, his first and best known play, is a prime example. Its plot (Using the term lightly) revolves around the Smiths and the Martins, their maid and the local fireman (also the maid's lover) telling each other meaningless facts about their lives. The original name was even "English Without Toil." The dialogues from his French textbook were also adapted into a set of short plays. | |
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There must be one of these in James May's academic history, as he revealed on an episode of Top Gear that the only German sentence he knows is "Aber ja, natürlich Hans naß ist. Er steht unter einem waßerfall." which translates to "Naturally Hans is wet; he's standing under a waterfall." | |
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Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's Principles of Macroeconomics: one of the online versions quizzes has a series of questions beginning with Jules wants to purchase a royale with cheese (a type of sandwich), from Vincent. | |
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Even economics' dull younger sibling accounting does this occasionally. One accountancy textbook used for TAFE courses in Australia contains a chapter in which nearly all the examples are Star Trek references. | |
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Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes has a particular exercise in its third chapter that brutally deconstructs a certain scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Augustus Gloop falls into the chocolate river. The questions it asks essentially boils down to "what would it actually feel like to be stuck there, and why was the last time this happened in real life fatal?" Allegedly, this question serves as the de-facto hazing ritual for every chemical engineering student that has to use this textbook. | |
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Real cases used in casebook examples often get into this—particularly books on torts, where the cases are often seemingly crazy to start with. One American torts book starts with not one but two cases in which a minor pulls a chair out from under someone and is found liable for battery,note Although in one case (Ghassamieh v. Schafer, a 1979 case from Maryland), the liability for battery was meaningless, as the statute of limitations on battery had passed and the case was on a negligence theory held to be waived because there was battery and the plaintiff hadn't argued a negligence theory at trial. Yes, the law is weird. and another includes one where a woman successfully sued a man for battery on account of giving her herpes (he hadn't told her he had the disease). One torts textbook illustrates how evidence can be used to show that a business ignored a hazard by comparing two cases of people slipping on a banana peel.note In one, it was unknown how old the peel was; in the other, the peel was "black and gritty" and had clearly been there for some time. In the second case, it was clear that the business (a train station) had plenty of time to clean up the peel and prevent the slip. The compilers/editors tend to note this with the dry humor characteristic of today's lawyers and judges. | |
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Page 205 Introduction to Psychology by James W. Kalat uses hilariously off-model Pokémon ersatzes to illustrate the effects of classical conditioning. | |
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For the TAPPS 2011 social studies competition, the script of Apollo 13 is included as supplementary material, with footnotes noting differences between the script and real life. One footnote says: [Here is how the movie departs from the actual mission: Jim Lovell's Corvette was actually blue.] It seems odd including Lovell's Corvette as an actual part of the mission. | |
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A variable named "maxwell" initialized to 86 and, though locally declared to be an integer, surreptitiously allowed to assume the value .007 for the duration spent viewing the movie The Sound of Music. | |
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Language learning app Duolingo has plenty of odd sentences for you to translate. Ever wanted to ask a Norwegian why there's a Swedish telemarketer in your bed? Duolingo will teach you how! | |
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Fourier Analysis by Thomas William Kömer quotes the "cider in your ear" speech from Guys and Dolls in a chapter about data analysis. | |
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Most textbooks for the Python programming language, as well as the online Python documentation, make numerous references to its namesake: | |
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P. J. Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire is a scholarly account of the late Roman Empire and surrounding regions, with a tendency to title its sections things like "Rome is where the heart is" and "Thrace: The Final Frontier". | |
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There was at least one GCSE maths book in the '90s that featured a cameo by Del Boy and Rodney. | |
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One image in Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective has the caption of: "Here is an American nuclear family comprised of mother, father, and two children. Please note that the large yellow kid with the poor complexion is not a member of this nuclear family." | |
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A Swedish high school textbook on mathematics includes a problem where the student is to figure out for how long Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation can be inside a core reactor before the radiation is going to kill him. | |
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Comedy Tropes | |
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Older Than Radio | |
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School Tropes | |
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Textbook Humor |
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