Nicolai Reshetikhin's Private Joke File
Nicolai Reshetikhin is a calculus professor at UC Berkeley. Specializing
in mathematical physics,
he is arguably one of the most intelligent men alive today. But
besides his groundbreaking
accomplishments in the fields of theoretical physics and applied
mathematics, Prof. Reshetikhin
is also the proprietor of one of the greatest senses of humor ever
to emerge from the seethy
depths of the former Soviet Union. It's not everyone who can put
an enticing lecture on line
integrals and vector fields on hold to entertain his students with
a light-hearted romp through
narrative discourse, but Nicolai has got that down, boy (sorry
if that sentence is awkward; I was
listening to the funny Nostradamus hurmbagger radio commercial
whilst typing it and I don't
feel like going back over it). Anyhoo, here are some of the wonderful
pearls of comedy that
I can remember from my two semesters of Calculus with Nick Resh.
(These jokes will be more effective if you read them aloud in an
incredibly thick Russian accent.)
***
A man is walking down the road and it's raining,
and he is all bundled up in his jacket and his umbrella and he is very
sad and angry to be walking through the mud. He sees this other fellow
on the road and he is laughing and skipping and very happy, and he doesn't
have jacket or umbrella and he's only got the one shoe on. So the other
man goes up to him and says, "Why are you so happy when it's raining and
muddy and you don't have jacket or umbrella and you've already lost a shoe?"
And the other man says, "No, I found one."
***
Two friends are riding on the subway and one friend
looks upset so his friend asks him, "What's wrong?" and his friend says,
"I don't feel good." So his friend says, "Ah, I know. Don't worry. I will
go get some drinks, we will have party here." So the friend leaves and
comes back in few minutes with the drinks and his friend is dead. And he
says, "Oh, that's what he meant."
***
Two men are walking their dogs and it starts to rain,
so one man says, "Don't worry, we will go into cafe and have coffee until
the rain stops. So they go to the cafe and there is sign that says, "No
pets except seeing eye dogs" and the one man says, "It's okay, we will
put on our glasses and they think we're blind." So they go into the cafe
and one man has labrador and the other man has chihuahua. The manager comes
up and says, "You can't have pets in here except seeing eye dog." and the
man says, "So?" and the manager says, "This is chihuahua." So the man says,
"Oh! They gave me chihuahua!?"
***
In the Soviet Union they would have big military
parade through Red Square every year, so one year everyone is watching
parade. First comes the infantry soldiers, then the officers, then the
tanks, then the heavy artillery, and after the biggest guns were three
men walking in a row. Kruschev is watching parade and he doesn't know who
these men are. He asks the army general if they are his men, and the general
doesn't know who they are. He asks the KGB man if they are part of KGB,
and he doesn't know either. Finally he asks government official and he
says, "That is Economic Planning Commission. It's only three men, but it's
still the most destructive weapon in the Soviet Union.
***
A man is walking through Red Square carrying machine
gun. The police come up and say, "You can't walking around in public with
machine gun." The man says, "This isn't machine gun, this is calculator."
The policeman pulls pocket out calculator and says, "No, this is calculator.
That is machine gun." The man says, "No, that is calculator for elementary
mathematics. This is calculator for the final countdown."
("So remember," added Reshetikhin after telling this
joke. "No calculators on the exam.")
***
There is this mental hospital, and for discipline
the worst thing that they can do to patient is process called "differentiation."
So one day a patient is breaking rules and the doctor says, "If you don't
behave we will differentiate you, aren't you afraid to be differentiated?"
And the patient says, "No, you see, I am the function e to the x."
***
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