Can god make up a joke she doesn't understand?

Some tedious fools are still asking if god can lift infinitely heavy rocks, but Erisians know the answer is "yes, after a nap", and choose to probe the deeper questions.

What does it take to think up a joke? Is it the free-association of different words, arriving at a novel sentence?

For example, "I'll have the eggs benedict." or "The unusual cabinet gestures into the spicy slingshot."

No, it's not just any old words slapped together in a new way.

A joke needs a context, it needs to connect ideas in a surprising way. Yet those ideas must be shared between the teller and the listener for there to be anything to laugh about. Take for example a simple joke that many young children learn: the one with the punchline "Orange you glad I didn't say banana?"

Whoever thought up that joke, they needed to be in a world that already had knock-knock jokes, because it's a play on the formula. Which means they needed a world with doors, and houses. Their world also needed those two fruits on it, which means it had to have evolved flowers, and scientists who were interested in cross-breeding plants. That joke was made up in the linguistic context of English, because "orange" sounds like "aren't", something that's highly unlikely to be true in a language that evolved on an alien planet, and is probably only rarely true for other languages on Earth.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

There is no way to jump to this punchline and skip all the intervening context which made it possible. You cannot, so to speak, make up this joke "from scratch". Now you might say, what if I just took an infinite number of typewriting monkeys, surely they would arrive at this punchline much more quickly than the complete works of Shakespeare. And that's fair - if they only were typing ASCII characters they would each have a 1 in 7.2×10⁷⁵ chance of producing that sentence at random, the same chance as any other 36-character long string. If there were one trillion monkeys each typing out one sentence every millisecond, it would only take about 1.66×10⁴³ ages of the universe.

So you're telling me there's a chance.

But even then, would they understand it? Could it be a joke if it had no known referent and was simply produced randomly? Would Eris find it delightful when she told it? Or would she not get it?

Through a roar of overlapping clicks and tapping sounds, a short chime rings out. An infinite number of hands pause their work and lift from their keyboards, then an infinite number of heads turn their attention to the loudspeaker above.

Esteemed members of the Dactylographic Society, we thank each and every one of you for submitting your ballots at our recent convention. Though it took us a while to count them all, votes collected for the 'All-Time Funniest Joke' category have now been tallied, and the winner is...

Entry #14:

"fNRZw16r Tre\g XZUoBRVj3wd2s j5vf9U!"

~ Typed by Typist #65.030.581

Again, thank you all for participating in this convention's poll. We took some time to interview attendees at the reception held after the award ceremony, let's hear what they had to say:

"Well-deserved! It's the exclamation mark honestly, gets me every time. I gotta say, it's all in the delivery though." ~ Typist #114.722

"I can't stop quoting this. My coworkers tell me they're sick of it, but I don't care it's just too good." ~ Typist #1.600

But some attendees were more critical:

"Overplayed for me. I loved Typist #65.030.581's earlier work but lately they seem tired." ~ Typist #74

"Tre\g off." ~ Typist #943.865.320.712

In their acceptance speech, even the winner showed signs of disappointment:

"It's such an honor to be recognized, of course. I wonder though, will this be it, will this be my legacy? I'm glad it's brought so many people such joy, but I was in a dark place when I typed this. I just don't think it's as funny as some of my earlier work." ~ Typist #65.030.581

Notes from the Simian Semi-Eonian All-Typist Convention, 8th Universe.

That is to say, even if you are an all-powerful being, you cannot reach into the infinity of information and imagination to simply pluck a joke like an apple. You must walk into that infinity. You must proceed through the entire history of evolutionary and linguistic life on Earth, to find yourself in a moment where making up this joke is possible. As a listener, you must have walked that same path, be a product of that same history, to appreciate the joke when you hear it. Oh what a rare and precious thing to hear a Dad joke.

Don’t trust atoms, they make up everything.

Gift shop t-shirts available nationwide

OK but, why is there something, rather than nothing?

To answer this question, you'll need to go back with me please, way back - 5 billion years ago. Here, the material that will eventually make up Earth hasn't even gathered yet, it's just a field of gas and floating dust.

Say what you will about it, it's not particularly funny.

For Eris so loved the joke, that she gave her radiant Sun, that whoever evolveth around it shall be not dull, but have eternal laugh.

Book of Rad Diaries - Yawn chapter 🌳:16