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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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it's perfectly comprehensible to me
someone's girlfriend sits on her phone 24/7, but somehow consistently fails to pick up a call when her partner calls to double check something on the grocery list, with the joke being that her phone disappears into a black hole when that happens
If the joke relies on that much of an assumption about a fringe scenario, then that context should have been provided within the joke. For example, the appositive “her” has no reference noun and therein no information about her connection to the joketeller.
In a similar vein of lacking context, can you explain this joke?
"A dog walks into a tavern and says, 'I can't see a thing. I'll open this one'."
It's a funny relatable thing that happens. It's happened to me enough times trying to get ahold of my wife. Obviously it's common enough that this post was made and upvoted.
It’s relatable to only a small percentage of people (fraction of people who are interested in relationships with women, subset people who are in relationships with women, subset people whose women partner is phone obsessed, subset people who cannot independently shop for groceries, subset people who while grocery shopping have had their women partner fail to answer her phone, subset people who have this happen routinely or significantly enough to even notice or care). You will see others saying that it’s relatable but that will just be confirmation bias.
And for each person who has experienced this, they only once could have experienced it as the image describes since black holes do not relinquish the matter they absorb. Who even would be in a relationship with somebody who is both on their phone 24/7 and be short distance enough to share groceries? The hyperbole is too literal and becomes nonsensical rather than comedic.
youre reading far to deep into this, this doesnt even happen to me (i dont call people) and i understood it right away
Happens to me all the time. Wife non-stop staring at her phone, unreachable when I call needing something extra from the store. It's almost uncanny how relatable this is.
Who doesn't call their SO at the store? "Shit, forgot to ask her to get beer."
The joke is so poorly phrased that you inverted the roles of who is shopping
Because the joke doesn't change depending on who is in the store.
It is the exact same joke.
“call” is a transitive verb.
“from” is a preposition.
Words have meaning. Grammar has a purpose. The joke-teller is necessarily within the store making a call to an unspecified “her” for unspecified reasons and we know this via the rare skill known as reading. Just because a vocal plurality of people interpret a Rorschach inkblot test or a Jackson Pollock painting as a specific message, that does not make those pieces mean anything, let alone any specific one thing or analogous things.
Multiple of your fractional subsets don't apply. It doesn't have to be a woman, doesn't need to be a "relationship" as typically meant by the term, and didn't hinge on some strange inability to "independently shop for groceries".
Ok, then a person who uses “her” as a pronoun rather than exclusively a woman.
All other criteria are essential to meet the apparent meaning of the joke.
No. You have a very strangely rigid concept of what pieces are actually required for the joke here. A person who is usually on their phone is difficult to contact. The "joke" is the disconnect between a person being apparently on their phone at all times and being unable to contact them yourself when needing to. That's literally it. Every other detail is just window dressing.
I understood that much. Take it up with shneancy@lemmy.world for what their interpretation requires.
The set dressing either should have been communicated clearer to not be confusing or wholly omitted.
In your bubble maybe, but please don't assume your experiences are indicative of a broader group.
the context is the real life situation that OP experiences, i also have experienced that and find the joke funny, but it doesn't have to be funny to everyone. you are simply not the target audience
I’d understand the scenario and perhaps even find it funny if the joke-teller were to provide the essential context
not everything is made for you
Yes, that’s why the first thing I said was asking if it was meant to be comprehensible because I could not parse a clear and singular intent behind it for reasons I’ve already mentioned. “Incomprehensible” is a genre of media, especially for TikTok.
She could be my roommate. I think the only necessary parts of the joke are...
!sharing a fridge!
having cell-phones
some level of appreciation for cosmology
maybe post-modern communication foibles, maybe that's the synergy effect.
I think the gender part is pretty optional. This could happen to anyone who shares foodgathering inventory management.
I could see this being unintuitive to anyone who hasn't had to hold up a full end of an adult relationship. Or industrial logistics, I guess.
Jokes are temporary, they help keep people from thinking constantly about their struggles and doom, while laughing together about contextual situations in variations of society. This image you are angry about will be forgotten about soon and was a temporary little spark in existence that made a few people laugh and comment.
They don’t need to be timeless, and those that survive can potentially make people laugh in the future. It’s ok to ask what you don’t get about a joke, and it’s ok for jokes to exist as in jokes for those who get the context.
Some of them, the most basic, which are generally wordplay or best told in person will survive. What part about the ancient Sumerian dog joke made you laugh? The fact that it’s choosing an eye to open so it can see? And that it was probably best told in person as someone had their eyes closed and then opened an eye as they told the punchline?
Where are you getting these assumptions from? Also, your comment comes across as really condescending and preachy imo. It’s like you think I don’t understand what a joke is or that all these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.
You’re totally right I assumed.
collapsed inline media
If you’re not angry, and that’s your verbiage on being critical of a simple meme, I’d hate to see what an angry comment from you looks like
You asked the community for context and I provided a version of it based on having heard that joke before.
Of course those are both assumptions, human communication is assumption based on known information, it’s shitty telepathy except when it’s math, and even then it’s not perfect.
“word salad and non-sequitors without premise” is genuinely a common aim and market for TikTok media. It was only a criticism if that wasn’t what the joke-teller was going for, and that’s what I wanted clarification of.
Last I heard, even historians have yet to come up with the context or meaning for that joke.
Then don’t assert those claims with such absolutism and authority?
I never claimed to be an authority, I just said that’s how I heard that joke explained before. Because whoever wrote the joke has been dead for an incredibly long time and if it’s funny to someone today in whatever context it’s fine. Are you claiming that if we can’t come up with the actual context to explain the ancient Sumerian joke then it is permanently not funny without context and that ancient Sumer was the OG tiktoker for not providing all the context?
This stupid TikTok joke may be dug up in thousands of years by some advanced machine version of us and they may do the same, of trying to figure out context and maybe getting a laugh, though thanks to the fact that commenters have explained it, perhaps they’ll scrape other metadata as well and figure out the original context. And if not, and they get a laugh out of however they understand it, that’s pretty neat too.
We are children in a vast enveloping cosmic dark. We should be serious about things that truly matter, mostly about trying to help each other and move forward as a species, and laugh or brush off things that we think are dumb.