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STAR CRAVING MAD
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STAR CRAVING MAD
Papa Bear to Baby Bear: What’s the matter with you?
Baby Bear (pointing to a constellation of stars): I can’t get enough of those.
Papa Bear: Whataya mean?
Baby Bear: They’re driving me crazy!
What’s so funny about this? When I was a kid there was no such thing as OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder. Well, OK, maybe there was but it sure wasn’t called OCD. First of all, the obsession and compulsion weren’t even linked. Mostly people with the one condition or the other were just called nuts or crazy. I realize this is not a very enlightened comment, but what I’m mostly complaining about here is that there seems to be so many new “disorders” like OCD or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), that somehow create a distance between us and the so-called sick person. I sense that we really don’t know much more about these conditions than we did in the past and have just come to rely on more and more drugs to mask and suppress symptoms rather than looking for real cures. OK, I’ll get off my soap box, or speaker’s platform and concentrate on the joke. We have here a young bear who appears to be obsessed with stars. He admits he cannot get enough of them, but of course stars being what they are, that is, incredibly distant suns and not jewels in the sky, the young bear will never actually own or possess any of them. That knowledge hasn’t stopped his cravings, apparently. Here’s where the word play comes in. There is a common collocation or word combination that means “extremely crazy.” That combination is “stark raving mad.” It means being insane to the point of running around, screaming at everything. But if we connect the final K of stark to the next word, “raving,” then we get “craving” (spelled with a C instead of K). So we get “star-craving”, someone desperate for stars, rather than stark raving. Maddening isn’t it. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
This joke came from a post by Analytical Grammar on facebook.com
#joke #pun #ESL #ELT #ELL #ELD #ESOL #EFL #TESOL #TESL #Englishlanguage #English #language #learnenglish #twinglish #wordplay #starkravingmad
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