Antwitz Anti-Jokes

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Suhail Rahim.

Welcome to the show, Suhail.

I’m calling from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and actually, I have a mystery that I’ve been trying to solve for the last 45 years.

Oh, wow.

I used to be at a boarding school in England in the early 70s, and we had a German exchange student who came over from Germany.

And one night, all of us were sitting around telling jokes and riddles and so on.

And after a while, this guy, this German guy says, I want to ask you something.

So we said, fire away.

And he said, what’s the difference between a frog?

And we said, OK, what’s the difference between a frog and what?

He said, no, what’s the difference between a frog?

And he repeated that a couple of times.

So obviously, none of us knew what he was talking about.

So he said, I’ll give you the answer.

And he said, the greener it is, the faster it swims.

So, again, that didn’t make any sense to us.

And we asked him a couple of times to try and explain it, but obviously something was getting lost in the translation.

So that’s where it basically ended.

But I’m sure there was something in German, some expression in German that made sense.

But in English, obviously, we couldn’t understand what he was talking about.

So I’m trying to look for an answer for that.

So the joke is, what’s the difference between a frog?

And then the answer is, the greener it is, the faster it swims.

Right.

Right. And it doesn’t make sense.

Absolutely. So that’s all I know. And I’m trying to find the answer.

You know, what’s funny about this is that it’s part of a whole genre of German jokes.

One of these is called an antivitz, which means anti-joke.

And they’re just these ridiculous jokes.

There are lots of them about frogs.

There are lots of them that go like, what’s yellow and is a banana?

Or what’s the difference between a stork?

A stork has two equally long hind legs and especially the left one.

I mean, they make no sense at all.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

I have a German-speaking friend who said, oh, yeah, we grew up on those.

They’re just hilarious, aren’t they?

And at first I was thinking, no, but the more of them she told me, it’s sort of like they sort of get you and they start to be funny.

There are a whole lot of them that involve two skyscrapers in the basement.

Oh, really?

Yeah, which they’re just completely in the center or two cows sitting on a park bench knitting.

They’re just really, really, really silly.

And I don’t know what it says about the German national character, but these kinds of jokes are really popular among German speakers.

So it wasn’t a joke that his schoolmate made up.

It was something that came from the whole German culture.

Yeah, that’s a classic, the one about the frog.

Oh, that’s amazing.

I mean, obviously I’ve been trying to understand it for the last 45 years, and I’ve told so many people about it, and we all ended up laughing because it’s just so ridiculous.

And I didn’t know the background to this, but now it makes perfect sense.

Exactly.

Well, that’s exactly it, that they’re just so ridiculous.

Like, here’s another one.

Two men walk across a bridge.

One falls into the water.

The other is called Helmut.

Because they take the form of a joke, and you think, oh, yeah, okay, I’ve got a good premise here.

This is good.

You’re setting this up, and then there’s nothing.

There’s nothing.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

So did we solve this 45-year mystery for you?

Oh, I did.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

I’ll probably be on the lookout for more of these now.

Well, Google the word that Martha came up with, Antivitz, A-N-T-I-W-I-T-Z, and you’ll find a bunch more of these.

And I will tell you, too, that it’s not just the Germans.

The Chinese do this, too, and they go by a name that translates as cold jokes.

This is amazing. Thank you so much.

Sure, we’re glad to help.

All right. Thank you.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

Do you want to hear a Chinese cold joke?

Yes, so this is like the equivalent of the German antivitz.

Yeah, it goes, a steamed bun was walking down the street one day, and this steamed bun got hungry.

So he took a bite of himself, and then he was a steamed stuffed bun.

It’s so stupid.

It is dumb.

It’s so stupid.

But interestingly enough, in China, if somebody tells you a joke like that, a cold joke like that, you’re supposed to act as if it’s cold.

You’re supposed to shiver or say, whoa, there’s a cold wind blowing.

Oh, interesting.

Isn’t that cool?

Yeah, that is cool.

Yeah.

Tell us your cold jokes, your anti-vitz jokes, your weird non-sequitur jokes.

877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org, and we’ll try to share some of them on future shows.