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Can you please explain this joke: "I'm going bananas is what I tell my bananas before I leave the house"?

And another one: "I hate it when my friends ask me to do them a solid especially when I've been eating grapes all day"

Can you please give enough meanings and background without explaining how they are funny so that I can figure them out myself?

ColleenV
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Hammad Ahmed
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4 Answers4

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The first one is a play on the phrase 'I'm going bananas' to mean going a bit crazy. (Sounds a bit like a Tim Vine one-liner this). It is meant to make you think they are going crazy when you read the first three words, but then when you read the rest, you realise you misunderstood (due to the lack of punctuation) and that the person is actually saying to their bananas, that they are going.

I'm going bananas
"I'm going, bananas" is what I tell my bananas before I leave the house

This is a joke best delivered verbally. If done with the right timing, (pausing after the first bananas) it's makes the audience think they are saying that they are going crazy, then when you finish the sentence it's clear that you're not - you fooled them into thinking you were saying one thing, but said another.

In the second one, a solid refers to both a 'favour' and 'poo'.

When you eat a lot of grapes, you tend to have softer poos, hence why it is difficult to do a 'solid' and would be annoying (and more difficult) if a friend asked you to do them a solid.

Here the person telling this is purposefully misconstruing what their friend is asking them to do.

Smock
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  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Smock May 29 '19 at 15:59
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    But then again, if you're talking to your bananas, perhaps you really are going bananas. – LShaver May 30 '19 at 03:37
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    @LShaver I actually think that part needs to be in one of the answers. That was actually the part I got first. And it adds another layer to the joke. – trlkly May 30 '19 at 09:16
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    I would suggest expanding the explanation that the whole phrase "doing a solid" is an idiom for "doing a favor" meaning doing some act of kindness. You normally don't see it used with the other meaning of favor (e.g. you would not see "The knight had the king's solid." – Keeta - reinstate Monica May 30 '19 at 11:35
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    FYI - I believe this joke is an example of a Garden-path sentence. – BruceWayne May 30 '19 at 15:53
  • Solid, in either sense here, is not something I've ever heard in US English. – jamesqf May 30 '19 at 16:34
  • Perhaps capitalizing bananas in "I'm going, Bananas," would help alert the reader (though not the listener) that it is being used as a proper noun. – unutbu May 30 '19 at 21:55
  • Am I the only one who got the "leave the house" vs "leaf the house" pun, abusing the plural of "leaf" being "leaves"? – Danikov May 31 '19 at 11:03
  • @jamesqf Oh! I assumed it was an Americanism (British English speaker here). (I wouldn't find the "poo" meaning confusing, but the "favour" meaning would be completely new to me.) – Martin Bonner supports Monica May 31 '19 at 12:34
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    @unutbu "Bananas" is not a proper noun here, the same way that "guys" is not a proper noun in "How's it going, guys?" – wjandrea May 31 '19 at 14:15
  • @Keeta I don't think it's ambiguous. In "The knight had the king's favour", favour" is a mass noun. In "Could you do me a favour?" (e.g.), "favour" is a count noun. – wjandrea May 31 '19 at 14:45
  • @Martin Bonner: I'd find the "poo" meaning confusing, simply because outside of medical contexts (and perhaps toilet-training young children) people in the mainstream US simply don't discuss the subject often enough for there to be specific terms. – jamesqf May 31 '19 at 18:05
  • "(...) hence why it is difficult to do a 'solid' and would be annoying (and more difficult) if a friend asked you to do them a solid" - Yep, quite an annoyance, happens all the time – Marc.2377 Jun 01 '19 at 05:02
  • @LShaver - As the old joke goes, you're not bananas if you talk to your bananas. Worry, though, if they start talking back. – T.J. Crowder Jun 01 '19 at 11:13
  • @jamesqf I think I'd like to live in your US. Here in my US, people talk about "poo" (using cruder words), far, far, too often to my tastes. Meanwhile, in Jerry Seinfeld's US, people apparently do other people solids frequently enough that the audience is expected to find the term normal. "US English" is very very diverse thanks in no small part to the large amount of territory and cultures involved in its formation. One should exercise caution when making blanket claims about what constitutes "mainstream" usage. – jmbpiano Jun 01 '19 at 17:32
  • @jmbpiano: I won't disagree about the diversity of even US English, but IIRC the Seinfield TV show is about life in New York City. I don't think you'd find many people willing to argue that NYC is mainstream US. Indeed, the few times I've seen it, I was hard put to understand what the heck people were saying. (And in my US, people are far more likely to talk about "poo" that comes from horses - shoveled my share of that :-) - or bears, deer, &c, than what humans produce.) – jamesqf Jun 01 '19 at 19:29
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"I'm going bananas" is what I tell my bananas before I leave the house.

is a "garden-path sentence" . The Wikipedia article defines this as:

a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".

Perhaps the most famous example of a garden-path sentence is:

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

which plays on two different meanings of "like" (in a way similar to; enjoy) and two meanings of "fly" (to travel through the air or move swiftly; an insect)

Another much cited example is:

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

Here "houses" is initially interpreted as a noun, but in fact the sentence only makes sense if it is being used as a verb, meaning "to provide housing for", and "complex" is initially interpreted as an adjective ("complicated" or "made of many parts") but is in fact a noun (a group of buildings on the same site)

David Siegel
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    And that "complex" is a noun instead of an adjective. – Sled May 30 '19 at 00:12
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    "two different meanings of fly" Huh. My first interpretation was that it was a joke about thrown fruit. – nick012000 May 30 '19 at 03:15
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    "Flys" was at one time in the past a valid plural of "fly" (as in insect). And that is an old joke, but I suspect that "flys" as a plural these days would cause confusion to some. In any case always check your flies before you leave the house. :) – Wossname May 30 '19 at 09:31
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    @nick012000 - you're not alone. I thought that for about 15 years, before I first read on stack exchange what the phrase was actually intended to mean. – AndyT May 30 '19 at 09:53
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    This sounds more like a Paraprosdokian to me than a garden-path sentence. – A N May 30 '19 at 14:43
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    @nick012000 It's both, really: fruit flies do like bananas, and when any fruit is thrown, it flies pretty much like a banana does. For me, that's part of the beauty of the sentence. – David Richerby May 30 '19 at 16:18
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    @A N I think that sentence is both. I think there is a sizable overlap, many if not most Paraprosdokians will also be garden-path sentences, and a significant number of garden-path sentences will also be Paraprosdokians. I am not fond of this coined pseudo-clasical term (Paraprosdokian), by the way, but it is in use. – David Siegel May 30 '19 at 18:46
  • @DavidSiegel the defining characteristic seems (from my reading) to be that a garden-path sentence is one that unintentionally creates confusion, while a Paraprosdokian is intentional and uses homonyms for humorous effect (as we see here). Garden-path sentences, like the one in your example about housing soldiers, can be difficult to parse. – A N Jun 01 '19 at 21:21
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  1. "I'm going (= becoming) bananas!" (= crazy).
  2. "I'm going (= go out somewhere), bananas" (the fruit) is what I tell my bananas (the fruit) before I leave the house

I am speaking to the fruit as if they were sentient and could understand me, which in turn makes me look and sound quite bananas (crazy, loony etc.).

to go bananas (slang)
1. To become irrational or crazy.
I'll end up going bananas if I have to work in this cubicle for one more day!
1. to go mildly crazy.
Sorry, I just went bananas for a minute.
I thought he was going to go bananas.
2. To express great excitement about something in an exuberant manner.
The kids are going to go bananas when we tell them about the trip.

source

Mari-Lou A
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    Mari-Lou is the only respondent so far who actually understood the banana joke. The other answers all miss the point - that the speaker is using the fact that they talk to fruit to demonstrate that they're not actually crazy. – Dawood ibn Kareem Jun 01 '19 at 03:30
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I tell the bananas:

I'm going, bananas.

I'm going, Lucy. [leaving]

idiom: to go bananas,to go nuts, to go crazy

Lambie
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    While this is correct, it doesn't really explain the sentence as a whole as well as some of the other answers do. – V2Blast May 31 '19 at 06:09