RE: my humourous moonshine joke
the other day i made a joke about moonshine to a widespread applause:
look, i know i may not be everybody's cup of tea, but there's no tea in this cup.. only moonshine.
i came up with this joke a couple years ago but i never said it aloud until the other day.
well, i just did a cautionary search and unfortunately this joke has been made before.
the joke had been made by a facebook meme page with 200 likes, Female Problems:
i doubt i could have stolen this joke as i have never seen this page before. all my problems are male, but if i accidentally did somehow see this joke and then steal it, then i know for a fact that i wrote it better.
"I'm not everyone's cup of tea Because I am not tea I'm Probably moonshine tbh"
whats with the capital letters and apostrophes and lack of punctuation. whats with the tbh. lazy.
and didnt borges have a story about a guy who accidentally rewrote the thousanr page novel don quixote word for word?
so re: my humourous moonshine joke. thats life, these things happen.
and i just reread the borges story now. well, i got it all somewhat wrong. borges' character pierre menard didnt just accidentally rewrite don quixote out of nowhere. he read it once when he was ten years old and in his late career decided to rewrite just a couple random chapters as a kind of game. and to achieve this, he thought, he would first have to "become cervantes" through a convoluted act of method acting.
before he could write, he would have to "know spanish well, recover the catholic faith, fight against the moors or the turks, forget the history of europe between the years 1602 and 1918, become miguel de cervantes"
as for me, i have no idea who the this Female Problems admin is. judging by her moonshine joke, she is probably the millenial version of a southern belle. so i know for a fact that i probably havent larped her.
and i just checked. i really hadnt read this borges story very carefully. immediately after saying the afformentioned sentence, pierre menard says that this larping method is both too impossible and too uninteresting. the real interesting thing would be to rewrite don quixote not by becoming the spanish prisoner cervantes in 1602 but by staying as the french academic pierre menard in 1918, so that if in fact the quixotes turn out to be the same, they will still be different works because they are written by two different people in two different contexts: cervantes writing in a dungeon jail and menard writing it in a nice big study with raymond russel on the shelf all lit up by a big electric lightbulb.
so there you have it. i didnt steal the moonshien joke on purpose or by accident and if i did accidentally happen to make the exact same joke, then it is a different one because i was writing it as a languid bloke from a veranda in australia and this admin was writing it as a listless woman from a screened porch in mississippi or something.
and can i be frank? no? ok, well i'll just be ben.
and that above is another joke i made up but its actually a joke i once heard from my uncle john when i was a boy, and the other day i said this joke to my three year old nephew so in many ways it is the exact same joke but it is also a different joke because my uncle john worked his whole life as a mechanic and i worked my whole life as a layabout.
and that last joke is my joke. i came up with it just now and i dont think that anyone has ever said it before, and if they did, then they didnt because of all the reasons i have just said before.