“Mom, I don’t know what to do. We just had a huge fight.”
“It’s perfectly normal, honey. All newlywed couples go through something like this. You just need to admit to your mistakes, and move on.”
“Well, it’s great advice and all but what do I do with his dead body?”
Joke Poo: The Internship
Three weeks into her summer internship, the intern calls her college advisor, sobbing hysterically over the phone.
“Professor Thompson, I don’t know what to do! Mr. Henderson just gave me an absolutely impossible assignment!”
“It’s perfectly normal, dear. All new interns face challenges. You need to break it down, identify your resources, and persevere.”
“Well, that’s helpful advice and all, but what do I do with this PowerPoint presentation…it’s absolute doo doo.”
Okay, let’s dissect this darkly humorous joke.
Joke Analysis:
- Setup: Standard newlywed problem narrative. We’re led to believe it’s a typical marital spat.
- Misdirection: The mother’s advice reinforces the “typical fight” assumption.
- Punchline: The wife’s final question subverts the expectation. It reveals a drastically different (and morbid) reality.
- Humor Type: Dark humor, shock value, situational irony. The humor comes from the extreme disconnect between the anticipated scenario and the actual situation.
- Key Elements:
- Newlywed life
- Mother-daughter relationship (advice-giving)
- Marital arguments
- Murder
- Irony
Comedic Enrichment:
Given these elements, I can riff on this with a “Did You Know?” style observation that enhances the joke’s darkly comedic nature:
Did You Know?
While the divorce rate hovers around 50% for first marriages, the mortality rate for husbands involved in “intense newlywed arguments” within the first three weeks of marriage is statistically insignificant… unless you’re exclusively tracking cases of severe blunt force trauma reported via frantic, sobbing phone calls to the mother-in-law. In which case, suddenly, that rate spikes alarmingly. Further research is needed, but early data suggests that the advice “admit your mistakes and move on” takes on a whole new level of urgency. The advice is considered even more imperative than the ability to call emergency services.