BillyClark

I don’t know if I’m smart or not, but I think part of the joke is that the husband doesn’t recognize that his now-wife is his former best friend, and that unlikely circumstance kept me from understanding the joke even though I read the explanation. (Not the explanation in this thread but the more ambiguous one in the other thread.)

You said that you disagreed with the assertion that most funny jokes are obvious after the punchline. It is the first sentence in your reply. And it is on that basis that I believed that is what you were talking about.

I don’t think we can get anywhere if we try to debate based on what you or I personally think is funny. That’s why I specifically mentioned “the punchline”. Since the entire point of the punchline is to say the point of the joke, which is basically to make it obvious, I thought I was cleverly avoiding replies based on personal perspective. I hoped we could all agree that if we looked at a list of jokes that is generally agreed to be funny, most of them would be obvious after the punchline.

Why wouldn’t it be funny if it was obvious? Most funny jokes are obvious, at least after the punchline.