Setting the Bar
“A man walks into a bar after a long day at work and orders a drink. As he sits there, mulling over his day, he hears a high-pitched voice say, “That shirt looks great on you!”
The man looks around, doesn’t see anything, and returns to his drink thinking nothing more of it. But then, a moment later, the voice returns, this time offering, “You seem like a really cool guy!” Again, the man looks around, sees nothing, and returns to his drink, wondering if he should get checked out by a professional. Then he hears, “I bet your parents are really proud of you!” He slams down his drink and looks around wildly. Frustrated and finding no possible source of the voice, he calls over the bartender. He says, “Hey barkeep! What’s that voice I keep hearing?”
“Oh, those are the peanuts,” the bartender replies. “They’re complimentary.”
(Photo by Kirsty O’Connor/PA Images via Getty Images)
The syntax of this joke is “A man walks into a bar and …” – a very basic, common type of joke that was first published in a 1952 article by C. B. Palmer for the New York Times entitled “The Consummately Dry Martini.” This read: “A man walks into a bar and says he wants a very, very dry martini at a ratio of 25 to 1. The bartender is a little startled but mixes it precisely. As he pours it into just the glass, he asks the customer, ‘Would you like a twist of lemon with that?’ The customer pounds the bar and shouts, ‘Listen, buddy! When I want a goddamn lemonade, I’ll ask for one!’. Although not as funny now as it presumably was in the 1950s, there is a vast range of variants that have developed since then, with this format being used by professional comedians as well as people in everyday scenarios telling jokes to friends. The man is often replaced with a woman; a person of a specific occupation, religion or nationality; a famous person; or an animal, depending on the punchline and/or the audience.