Allow me to go "around the world" here in a "half and half" effort to assist Bandersnatch and Confucius.

As Confucious famously once stated, "Woman who fly upside down have hairy crack up..." and in this case the bon mot of Bandersnatch may have appeared to do a ground loop to Confucious. We won't ever know if Confucious was referring to the famed Chicken Ranch in La Grange, TX, in 1973, when your Joke Briefer was but a young page at the Senate of the State of Texas in Austin. In that dark year, a reporter from Houston, TX went to LaGrange and discovered what every Aggie has known since 1888: Texas has a whorehouse in it! It was called the Chicken Ranch almost from the beginning because those seeking the attention of the soiled doves attending to certain needs at that location would often trade checkens for services. Your Joke Briefer is reminded of the famous punchline referring to a sexual miscommunication between a poultry purchasing investment banker and a farmer's wife that goes, "If you'll hold my cock and pullet, I'll scratch my ass!" But I digress.¹
At this time your Joke Briefer must confess to making a visit to the Chicken Ranch. Following the sketchy directions given by a Senate warehouse employee, a carpool of frightened collegians made the tip from Austin to the south end of LaGrange, turned onto the gravel road and drove for a mile or more and came upon (pardon the expression) the aforementioned house of ill repute. We piled out of the car and went to the front door and were met by a hefty African American lady of age and experience who eyed us up and down and let us into "the parlor" where we were told to sit. It was interesting that there was a Department of Public Safety state trooper who was by the door and asked us if we were going to "behave" which we vigorously assured him that we were. There was a Greyhound tour bus in the parking lot as well and your Joke Briefer is not shitting you a pound about that! ² We were soon introduced to a lineup of 8 or so "practitioners" dressed in pant suits of the day's style who chatted among themselves as though we weren't there. Our experienced guide, a 20 year old ROTC student, told us we had to ask one of the ladies "for a date". To make a sordid story short, we had a choice of "the straight date", a "half and half" (I was so inexperienced I thought she was offering a coffee-style drink) or an "around the world" which was rumored to mean a lingual stop at a number of "locations" upon one's person. "Dates" were sought, fees were paid ($10, $15 and $20) we were taken to our rooms and peckers were washed by the practitioners and business was conducted. Then it was a long, guilty drive back to Austin while thinking of the misdeed under a bright Texas moon (pardon the expression again). Later, the Chicken Ranch was closed down as a result of Houston's Marvin Zindler and to this day the authors of Freakonomics attribute the rise in blindness among male students of Texas A&M University --starting in about 1975-- to the closing of the Chicken Ranch. We must beat off the "dust of confusion" on the rug of Confucious' joke and while Bandersnatch weaved in a minor technical correction to it, the intent and purpose are to haul the ashes of jocular conflictorialality before summer becomes as hot as a four-story cat house on coupon night.

Further readings and bibliography:
1. "Investment Banker Becomes Farmer Jokes - 2007 to 2013" Lehman Press, page 1,204.

2. "Times the Joke Briefer Has Shitted People a Pound", Spoor Press, page 45 (Abridged).

Perhaps I might be allowed to waltz in at this juncture to as we examine the joke that boomeranged back to us in the posit by London Banker? Like a Macquarie trader reading Penthouse magazine, let's take a long look down under the bonnet of the aforementioned "bon mot". I recommend a fresh mind in this effort so don't go down to the local head shop and bill a bong to the company credit card. It's that kind of swag, man, that can get you in trouble even in Colorado, but I digress. As we look at the comment by "Australia" pertaining to bending over for America and referencing "lube", London Banker was quick to parry with the query concerning the "convict" ancestry of those initially shipped off to that Continent in south 30s and 40s. Your Joke Briefer thinks that the influx of American baseball interests into the land down under's 22 million people is part of "Australia"s comment. Competing with cricket, soccer and rugby, American baseball is getting a solid handhold in the "backblocks" if not the bush of the locals, pardon the expression. It is though baseball's first chorus of "Begin the Bogan" is starting to play to 'Strine crowds. It reminds your Joke Briefer of the story of the British trader from Goldman's London office arriving in Sydney and going through customs:

'A pom who works for Goldman Sachs, fresh off the plane at Sydney airport, is trying to negotiate Australian customs. Finally, when it's his turn to get his passport stamped, the customs officer starts rattling off the usual questions:
C.O. - How long do you intend to stay?
POM - 1 week.
C.O. - What is the nature of this trip?
POM - Business.
C.O. - Do you have any past criminal convictions?
POM - Really? I didn't think we still needed to have them these days!
---------------------------------
"Quo vadis", you ask? Let's look at the literature and say g'day:

1. "Backblock Dumbasses: Failed American Utility and Commodity Trading Company Expansion into Australia 1995-2005, Green and Green, University of Omaha Press, 2008, 675 pages.

2. "Six and Brists - How Australians Took Over Americar", Barbie Hogan, This Is A Knife Press, Matilda Press, 333 pages.

3. "Australia Is Like an 84 Year Old Female Groin: Everyone Knows It's Down There but Nobody Cares" by Cecil Jumblies, Tasmaniacal Press, 255 pages.

After further review of prior Hotel Receipt Guy (HRG) posts it appears his "production" stopped before the DSK hotel event in NYC and has yet to recover. I suspect that the DSK hotel scandal, while a natural set up for the "receipt joke" of course, was a sad event that wasn't funny because of the nature of the scandal. An obvious conflict between a joke set up and real tragic allegations probably stopped the joke's muse at that point. Perhaps DSK had another victim in the loss of HRG?

Allow me to balance the books a bit here. The "Shecky" jokes are contributed by a writer -or writers- under a first name of "Shecky" (see Shecky Green) and a surname (not to be confused with the South American country) that is usually related to a personality somehow related the origins of the joke in some way. In this case I think the "Olaf" used as Shecky's surname relates to a former energy trader associated with Morgan Stanley's formerly massive energy commodity trading business. I could be wrong. "Olaf" is a common name among some Nordic peoples and has been used for centuries in "Sven and Oly (or Olaf") jokes, popular in the northern midwest of the United States, purporting to detail the many slapstick adventures of two Scandinavian immigrants who are hard workers but allegedly slow thinkers.¹ The history of observed "set ups" structure for the seemingly daily "Shecky" jokes has been "Opening Bell" news snippets and links. Basically, and in a financial sense, a reader hopefully still employed in the financial industry could be led to believe that the Shecky jokes are "self margining derivatives" of earlier linked stories in that the linked stories of Opening Bell are the "underlying" instrument, the Shecky joke is the first derivative and the commentariat "margins" the Shecky jokes with "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" that are colloquially referred to as "likes" or "dislikes". Going forward, the clever "Shecky Audit" made use of the surname jocularity which segued into a critical discussion and numerical notation of that readers perceived flaws of the joke. While the polls have not closed on the joke, an oral joke can take a licking at the hands of critics who seek to suck out and spit away poorly constructed grammar only to make the joke betterand that is a noble deed. The author of this particular Shecky joke committed to the joke, followed through with the joke and won't apologize for the joke as the joke creed states but in so doing, knowingly accepts the fate of the "mark-to-market" self-margining by the commentariat. As for the latter comment on the use of popular humoristics of profanity, vulgarity and or general crassness, it is well know that the aforementioned planks of a stable joke platform are extremely popular and have been well honed over time.² The more cerebral elements of such support planks in tales of joke-based ribaldry are typically enjoyed and presented by individuals employed to judge the nuances of distinguished members of society who price their job duty risk based on vast reservoirs of intelligence. The more basic, guttural forms of humor are enjoyed by those with underused IQs, those who have vast amounts of time for golfing on the company dime or attendees at Texas Railroad Commission cocktail parties. From your Joke Briefer's perspective, they could be so-called "landmen" as well. I would think that those who truly love "Little Johnny" jokes are on the "sell side" and may have recently wound up on the "cell side" if you get my inside joke.³ Concluding, I would say that the joke was true to form but deserved some criticism, much like Jerry Jones selling Victoria's Secret panties with a Cowboy logo within a store inside Cowboy Stadium.

1. "The 12 Jokes Consistently Told by Minnesota-based Commodity Traders between 1870- 2010", by Fats, Butter Cow Press, 6 pages.

2. "New Discoveries in Scatological Humor Among Remains of Migrating Hunter/Gatherers of the Bronze Age", Clovis and Bruce, Retreating Glacier Press, page 334.

3. "Intrusive Mechanics of Consensus Clustering of Proto-Indicative Neural Correlations Among Lyrical Improvisations in "Little Johnny" Jokes" , The Joke Briefer, Youngman Press, page 209.

I don't want to trumpet your mistake but the set up of that joke is "What is gray and comes in quartz?"

The set up uses a pun (quartz/quarts) with the shock answer (an elephant!) that the brain must decipher instantaneously. Such mental gymnastics are probably why comics and comedians live a long time.

Dearest Guest: Thank you for your call. Your Joke Briefer sees the commentariat "pun-ishing" other readers with lashes of one-liner wit related to mathematical puns. The erudite Mr. Levine started the thread wherein another "Guest" posted an image of dinosaurs joking with puns. That led to additional puns related to famous names in mathematical and other science related spheres of influence. In order, and using the Halloween platform for pun layering, Leibniz's integration theory was punned by Ta Daa. Guest responded with a Marie Curie "glow" pun (She won 2 Nobel prizes!). Then Ta Daa used the Curie's Xray theory to "see right through that one". Ta daa responded with a financial Nobel prze team's pun. Guest quickly reponded with a Heisenberg theory of uncertainty pun and finally Darwin's work with evolution theory was dropped upon us.

Your Joke Briefer has noted that in this part of Dealbreaker where comments are allowed, puns seem to be the most popular form of humor. Let us review this bit from the Wiki: "The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or metaphorical language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism uses an incorrect expression that alludes to another (usually correct) expression, but a pun uses a correct expression that alludes to another (sometimes correct but more often absurdly humorous) expression. Henri Bergson defined a pun as a sentence or utterance in which "two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we are confronted with only one series of words". Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, given that their usage and meaning are entirely local to a particular language and its culture. For example, camping is intense (in tents).
Puns are used to create humor and sometimes require a large vocabulary to understand. Puns have long been used by comedy writers, such as William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and George Carlin. The Roman playwright Plautus is famous for his tendency to make up and change the meaning of words to create puns in Latin."

Science makes for a great many puns. For example, the Higgs Bosun is not the title of a "naughty-cal" joke!

Don't wish to bug you, but it has been shown that "pun threads" have generated high "thumbs up" counts in the past as compared with attempts at guffartic singularities in the comment realm. Puns are simplistic jokes with immediate synaptic conflict resolution. That provides the engine for interpreted humor within the brain. Another description of the "pun" is that of a "quantum joke", or the smallest transmitted joke "particle". Puns, because of their tiny size, can take one shape of humor or actually be two different humor-quantic forms when simultaneously observed.¹ Not only do puns provide immediate humor registration in the brain, but when used in the comment section here and a high thumbs up total builds, they provide a near immediate boost in the author's "thumbs up" statistics which, in turn, boosts the self esteem of the author. That in itself is beneficial in that the author, his/her self-esteem boosted, may not make a bad trade, break wind, or conspire to bring down the financial system for at least some period of time.

1. "Observations of Previously Unobtainable Nano-silly (PUNS) Joke Particles", Commentariat Press, pages 228-316.

If I may come again, the redundancy issue genially raised by "Guest" was well played by the sharp eyed "ATM Machine" with the joke primarily resting in his moniker. While the original riff on redundancy in certain phrases may not be specifically assigned to any one particularly clever wordsmith or comic, the use of ATM Machine as a favorite redundant phrase can be attributed to the writing of the late George Carlin¹ in his book "Brain Droppings".

1. "Brain Droppings" , George Carlin, Hyperion Press (paperback), page 149.

The "Rex Ryan" created joke suggests that the readers/voters of the joke comment suffered transient pluripotent brain chemical discharges in that area of the brain comprising one's synaptic swarm matrices as the result of a Dealbreaker-centric, legacy joke meme applied to a high thumbs down joke tally. That indicates to me that the negative thumbs down - in the case of the Rex Ryan comment- implied more of a "groan" reaction than intense dislike.

Mighty Taco has suggested that "the mod (Dealbreaker's moderator of these comments) wouldn't like an Aristocrate (sic) joke anyhow...". It has been my experience that the "mod" has generally allowed all sorts of humor to be posted in this space. Mighty Taco's posit may be considered "lippy" by some but we shouldn't clam up about the joke itself. First, lets review "The Aristocrats!" as a joke:

""The Aristocrats" (also known as "The Debonaires" or "The Sophisticates" in some tellings) is an exceptionally transgressive (taboo-defying) dirty joke that has been told by numerous stand-up comedians since the vaudeville era. Throughout its long history, it has evolved from a clichéd staple of vaudevillian humor into a postmodern anti-joke. Steven Wright has likened it to a secret handshake among comedians, and it is seen as something of a game in which those who tell it try to top each other in terms of shock value. It is thought of as a badge of honor among expert comedians and is notoriously hard to perform successfully. It is rarely told the same way twice, often improvised, and was the subject of a 2005 documentary film of the same name. It received publicity when it was used by Gilbert Gottfried during the Friars' Club roast of Hugh Hefner in September 2001." ¹

Here, on this summer's eve, we are faced with Mighty Taco's opinion that his effort in a variation of the joke might not meet approval of the mod. In this instance I must say that a professional like Mighty Taco shouldn't "pussy out" of the joke after starting it. The rules of professional joke telling demand that the joke teller "(1) Commit to the joke. (2) Follow through with the joke and (3) never apologize for the joke." Mighty Taco has broken all three commandments in this instance but, as a group, joke tellers are not a punitive lot and certainly allow for ongoing redemptive gag-o-centric opportunities.

"The Aristocrats!" joke is more like a rap contest or a snap joke contest as in the ubiquitous "Yo Mama" jokes. "The Aristocrats" , being the punch line of a meandering obscene taboo breaking story told by popular and professional comedians hints at the darker side of joke telling and the over-arching synergies of co-predictive comedic self-loathing as a gag generator.²

However, in the forensics of funny we must also consider that Mighty Taco's effort was in itself a clever view of the "Aristocrats" joke in a slowed down view. The rapid fire reading skills of the commentariat instantly had the joke delivered within their own minds only to see the "falter" at the end of Mighty Taco's "snap" and realize that they (the commentariat) had been the victim of a non-joke at the event horizon of joke telling's "black hole" in much the same vein as the "..everyone on the floor and lets do the dinosaur" jokes that permeate certain rude image boards. Such an effect -- start the joke, quit the joke, refer to a "mod" reaction -- is in itself a longer fuzed chort-o-guffic joke.

Suggested readings:

1. Wikipedia - "The Aristocrats" Joke.

2. Pschotristic Joke Effects in Phrenological Studies Among Cohorts of Caffeinated Financial Employees, Dafuq and Hunh, Kaplan University press, pp466 - 512.