The Guardian polls scientists to get their favorite (and corniest) science jokes:
? A weed scientist goes into a shop. He asks: “Hey, you got any of that inhibitor of 3-phosphoshikimate-carboxyvinyl transferase? Shopkeeper: “You mean Roundup?” Scientist: “Yeah, that’s it. I can never remember that dang name.”
Made up by and first told by me.
John A Pickett, scientific leader of chemical ecology, Rothamsted Research…
? After sex, one behaviourist turned to another behaviourist and said, “That was great for you, but how was it for me?”
It’s an oldie. I came across it in the late 1980s in a book by cognitive science legend Philip Johnson-Laird. Behaviourism was a movement in psychology that put the scientific observation of behaviour above theorising about unobservables like thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Johnson-Laird was one of my teachers at Cambridge, and he was using the joke to comment on the “cognitive revolution” that had overthrown behaviourism and shown that we can indeed have a rigorous science of cognitive states. Charles Fernyhough, professor of psychology at the University of Durham
If you want to hear the positron one, you’ll have to click on the link.