I love Jon Hopkins' 2018 album Singularity. I came to it a little late, but by mid-2019 and well into 2020, I was listening to it constantly. Around that time, I made a drawing above — mostly as a vehicle to preserve a joke I’d made years earlier. A joke I still consider to be excellent.
Most other people, including my wife and son, disagree.
Below, I make my case to you. What follows is something I wrote in 2013 soon after making my joke. If we can classify this post as literature, this is one of the great jokes in the history of literature.
Earlier this week, I came perhaps as close as I’ll ever get to delivering a line as good as one of my favourite jokes of all time.
The ideal joke was delivered by Michael Scott (Steve Carell) in the American version of The Office. The joke comes in a scene in which he delivers a speech saying that he doesn’t distinguish between blue-collar and white-collar workers. Instead, he is ‘collar-blind’.
It’s one of my favourite jokes. And this week, at dinner with my wife and three-year-old son, I made a joke that comes close to being as good.
My wife was eating noodle soup with coriander and other herbs. She offered some to our son, who loves noodles.
'Do you want some?’ she said.
“I don’t like salad,” he said. He refers to any green — spinach, herbs, lettuce — as “salad,” and refuses to eat it.
The coriander was chopped and clinging to the noodles.
'I can take off some of the salad off of the noodles’, my wife said. 'But not all of it’. The sticking together sparked my idea for my joke.
'Do you know why the salad sticks with the noodles?’ I asked.
'No,' my wife said. 'Why?'
'It’s because it has salad-arity’, I said.
I expected a laugh but she just shook her head as she scraped coriander from noodles.
