Alien Joke #28
The punchline is the counter-clockwise rotation of a plasma torus inside of a standard blue-top T-battery return module. And that’s not in quotes, it’s not the phrase of all that, it’s actually all that. You’ll figure it out.
The Plasmaths are short lived but highly intelligent plasma creatures that snap in and out of existence as fully formed, conscious minds. They have no reproductive or developmental cycle, but are essentially conscious natural phenomena that manifest in favored conditions.
With no gradual introduction to consciousness, they tend to start out life pretty much barking mad. They rapidly assimilate their environmental data, but unless there is another living being around to orient them to communicate with life, they’ll become hardcore solipsist and treat everything but their own plasma as if it were an inanimate object. This leads to the majority of Plasmaths being non communicative spinning toruses of plasma that react only to things that effect plasma.
The Gumscapers are a semi-solid species native to the same planet as the Plasmaths. They have learned to manipulate solipsist Plasmaths using controlled plasma fields, to use them as portable energy sources. The arrangement is only semi-consensual. Obviously individual solipsist Plasmaths do not consent, but discussions with more socially acclimated Plasmaths revealed that a solipsist Plasmath can’t even grasp the concept of involuntary servitude to another being, and Plasmaths seem incapable of concern for other Plasmaths anyway, so the Gumscrapers just took the pass.
A standard red-top T-battery is mostly transparent, and has one active solipsist Plasmath torus spinning inside. The only control is a magnetic field latch that allows the torus to rotate clockwise, to draw energy from the torus, or counter-clockwise, to recharge. When the Plasmath is depleted, or just being uncooperative for unknown reasons, it is transferred to a blue-top cell to be returned to the plasma source.
Blue-top cells are distinct from red-top cells by the absence of the latch controls, blue tops only allow clockwise rotation so a Plasmath cannot be inadvertently charged. A fussy Plasmath can cause terrible damage to the source if it is returned fully charged and pissed off.
Unbeknownst to literally anyone except each individual, solipsist Plasmaths are actually incurable pranksters. Contrary to Gumscraper research, and even other Plasmaths, solipsist Plasmaths are fully aware of everything and everyone around them. They know they are being used as batteries and they do understand the concept of servitude. But they just don’t care because they don’t fully recognize they are in servitude to someone else. Their solipsism is so complete they just assume they’re doing all of it, it’s all in their minds, so they just go with the flow, mostly.
What is well beknownst to the Gumscrapers is that counter-clockwise rotating plasma in a blue-top battery means trouble, so if they see one, they tend to react with urgency, much to the delight of the pranking solipsist Plasmath.
It’s unclear to anyone but each individual solipsist Plasmath how common a joke this is. Or I guess it’s actually still unclear how common it is to each of them too since they don’t interact. But counter-clockwise rotating plasma is found in blue-top batteries fairly often, despite the magnetic latch meant to prevent it. So even though no one but individual solipsist Plasmaths knows whether or not this is even a joke at all, it seems like someone has to think it’s funny enough to keep doing it.
Alien Joke #904
The punchline is “Mostly Argon.”
It’s really more of a pun, but puns are only the lowest form of comedy in cultures with limited languages. In species with languages exceeding 100 million symbols, puns are sophisticated comedy. The multi-species culture of Vibeflue 14 uses such a language to allow communication between a variety of intelligent lifeforms.
Long ago in the first Vibeflue coupling epoch, before their interspecies language was mature, widespread forced interspecies co-habitation led to homogenization of names between the species. Since at that time there were few words that had fully agreed meaning between the languages, nouns like common atomic elements rose in popularity as individual names.
Due to species preferences for various elements and compounds, some names were chosen more than others and formed lasting associations. Argon became a favorite of an aerial gill feeding species called the Shineflues.
That’s about 1/5th of the explanation of just the Argon part. The rest of the pun is pretty much untranslatable. The Vibeflue language combines visual and audio symbols with context and time sensitive grammatical rules which allow punlike intersections that aren’t even conceivable in primitive languages. It would be like if a phrase was funny when you wrote it with both hands in two different languages at the same time while singing the word in tones corresponding to the letters in the word.
Also “Mostly Argon” involves a clinical knowledge of Shineflue physiology and Gagflue botany, including the aesthetic similarities of their erogenous zones, and their conflicting cultural taboos about using them.
I think the best analogy to convey the full meaning of “Mostly Argon” would be if a pun name like “Ben Dover” were imbued with all the comic value of a troupe of animatronic W.C. Fields’ performing Shakespearean comedies adapted with cutting modern social criticism.
Alien Joke #7
The punchline is “Seven”, but not the word or a symbol, just seven of something.
Networlds are some of the rarest planets in the universe. They are extremely dense, rocky planets with high metal contents that have undergone rapid tidal exscapulation followed by sudden cooling. The process leaves the planet an interconnected web of metal threads and channels. These planets are known to undergo a slow, but steady process of physical self-organization by poorly understood magnetohydrodynamic processes. After some time, the planets begin to transmit increasingly organized radio signals.
Ultimately it was discovered these networlds host sophisticated electrical consciousnesses called Ngons that interact with one another as simulations inside the vast computational capacity of the networld. Though they socialize as simulated beings, they are electrically corporeal and can interact with the physical world by various means.
Though interacting with the physical world for them is a bit like playing the claw game at an arcade. They observe physical reality as an external frame with only a course ability to sense and manipulate.
Numbers and mathematical relationships are as familiar to Ngons as water and swimming are to a fish. However, they exist so deeply in mathematical abstractions, the concept of numbers representing countable physical objects is somewhat mind blowing to them.
To an Ngon, numbers are fundamentally abstract constructs that exist within their networld. Four bits of data, four pulses, four cycles, four Ngons, are all four, but they are the same four, and that four is a product of networld. The idea that a group of four random cubes of carbon that exist somewhere on the opposite side of the universe are still the same ‘four’, is just bizarrely funny.
To find and count four of something in the physical realm is as psychadellically strange to them as finding a literal box of truth would be to us. And inside is a recognizable physical manifestation of truth, not a truth, but truth incarnate.
The absurdity of counting physical manifestations of numbers is always humorous on networlds, but a prime number is on another comedic level entirely.
They don’t really have ‘prime’ numbers because to them primes are the only meaningful number units, everything else is a derivation of a prime. But since they already think physical numbers are rather funny, the idea of a physical prime is several orders of magnitude more hilarious.
Just counting 3,5 and 9 and above objects is considered a classic comedy style, but 7 has even deeper context that can set networld comedy club simulations on simulated fire.
Networlds do not have an ‘economy’ in the classic sense because they have limited use for any interaction outside of their networld. However, each networld usually develops some means to exchange goods with other worlds. What they produce may vary considerably depending on demand and available resources, but networlds only ever seek one thing in exchange- nitrogen. Massive quantities of compressed or liquid nitrogen. Only networlds understand what they use it for, but it must be pretty important to them, because despite how rare networlds are they collectively constitute the universe’s largest importers of nitrogen by wide margins.
It’s been established that the full hilarity of counting 7 has something to do with the atomic number of nitrogen, but without a fuller understanding of why networlds value nitrogen or what they do with it, that’s probably as far as we go understanding this joke. And though in general, you should never try to tell alien jokes, seriously- no good can come of it, this is literally the only exception. If you ever pass by a networld, just drop seven of any random thing you have on it. It’ll make the whole planet’s day, I promise.