Jokes

Professor Garcia-Molina, taking a “joke break” in CS245:

A priest sees a little boy (very young) by leading a cow along a pathway. Worried that such a small boy was roaming around alone with a cow, he stops the boy and asks, “What are you doing with this cow?”

The boy replies, “I’m going to take it to mate with the bull.”

The priest is shocked that a young child would be assigned such a task.
“Shouldn’t your father do that?” the priest asks.

The boy says, “No. I think the cow should.”

When I was younger, I always made sure I had a healthy stash of jokes on hand. And it is to this, that I attribute much of my social success (if you believe I have any). Actually, being nice to girls is probably the most important one, but I think by 5th grade, everyone more or less was at that level.

Keeping a fresh joke in my head has helped me in so many ways. First of all, it makes you seem funny. Who doesn’t like to be around a funny kid? Second, exchanging jokes is an extremely fast way to convey your personality. Is this person nerdy? Crude? Sarcastic? And finally, jokes does wonders at breaking awkward silences. If not anything, at least you get some pity laughs, or you can ask others to share their jokes.

Of course, the challenge of this is to not repeat jokes. I’ve found that it’s OK—just make sure your audience is different enough. Jokes get old fast and people hate having to wait for punchlines they already know. All the more reason to stratify your friends!

The same goes for stories. Ideally, stories should be like jokes, only grounded slightly more in reality and possibly more personal (which makes you seem more worldly!). I think one of the best things I’ve done for myself in terms of preparing for interviews is getting my stories down well. Think about it. When they ask about “some challenge you’ve overcome in the past”, being able to re-tell an elaborate story effectively is not only entertaining but says something about your communication skills. Stories stick better, can be easily repeated by the interviewer to his boss, and hopefully start some interesting conversations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told the story of desperately acquiring enough compute power to render my cs348b project the day before it was due.

Taking advice from me is pretty risky. Proceed with caution: your mileage will vary. If worse comes to worst (is that the saying?), jokes and stories make great blog posts.