This is part 2 of the 2 blogs celebrating the best jokes about Dr Carson. So quick recap. Late last week, Republican Presidential front-runner, highly respected former neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson, also an author of a plethora of books, was caught in some, should we say inconsistencies at least, if not lies. It kept getting worse over the weekend and now several of his most inspirational stories from his books and speeches are found to have no merit, or have no evidence that they occurred. It ignited a firestorm of ridicule that was trending on Twitter under the hashtag #BenCarsonWikipedia for much of the weekend. I haven't seen that many jokes against any one candidate at any time before in such enormous volume in such a short time. Not Sarah Palin, not Mitt Romney, not Governor Oops ie Rick Perry nor Captain Moonbase Newt Gingrich.
I joined in the Twitter fun and will post two blogs about it. Yesterday I posted my favorites collection of what others wrote, with 104 very funny jokes. Today I am posting part 2, these are the 'best of' out of the jokes that I contributed. These are rated based on the reactions on Twitter (likes, retweets etc). For those readers who know who Dr Carson is and what all is involved with his current controversy, go ahead and read through. For those readers (my audience is worldwide) who don't know much about Dr Carson, please first skip to the bottom of this blog, there is a 'Dr Ben Carson Primer' for you. It explains the background briefly but covering the areas where he is known to say weird stuff like that Egyptian pyramids were not tombs for Pharaohs but rather he believes pyramids were built to store grain. Stuff like that. Most of the jokes don't make much sense if you don't know his various statements That section is clearly marked on the bottom of this blog.
So now to my contributions. Lets first just do the Top 12 best jokes, as rated by Twitter reactions. This is as good as I can get, if you like these, then maybe the rest of the blog is worth reading, but if you find these not funny, the rest are worse... So without any further ado, here 12 most popular jokes authored by me, on Twitter, relating to Dr Carson, and ranked by the Twitterati. Remember, the theme is this is the kind of stuff the politician has supposedly has also said: As if a Wikipedia was built according to beliefs and sayings of Dr Carson.
TOP 12 MOST LIKED JOKES ON BEN CARSON WIKIPEDIA THEME
As authored by Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat
And ranked by total cumulative Twitter engagements over 72 hours
12th most liked:
Some children have imaginary friends; I had an imaginary childhood
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(23 Twitter engagements)
at 11th best joke:
Not West Point military academy, gosh. I meant to say I was accepted to On Point, the ballet dancing academy
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(25 Twitter engagements)
at number 10:
Reindeer are regular deer who were left out in the rain, and they shrunk
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(26 Twitter engagements)
9th most liked joke:
When the previous Pope visited Detroit, he invited me to join the Papal Conclave in the Vatican. I turned it down
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(35 Twitter engagements)
at lucky number 8
Hitchcock conceived his movie Psycho after he met me in Detroit and I told him about my violent youth with the knife
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(36 Twitter engagements)
At James Bond’s number 7
Why did the Egyptian cross the road? To carry the grain to the pyramid
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(38 Twitter engagements)
The 6th most liked joke
As thanks for writing about evolution, Satan rewarded Darwin with eternal life. Darwin lives in Kenya. Obama is his son
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(40 Twitter engagements)
at number 5
In addition to West Point, I was accepted to South Park, the North Pole, and Bruce Springsteen's East Street Band
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(42 Twitter engagements)
the 4th most liked joke
Guns don't kill people, knife stabs don't kill people, hammers don't kill people; Obamacare kills people
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(102 Twitter engagements)
At 3rd best joke
Pyramids? Grain storage. Lenin's tomb? Grain storage. Taj Mahal? Grain storage. Eiffel Tower? Cemetery obviously
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(158 Twitter engagements)
At 2nd and runner up
Sarah Palin agrees with me. She can see the pyramids from her porch
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(193 Twitter engagements)
and the most liked Dr Carson joke:
I met Ronald Reagan on his Detroit visit, he offered me full scholarship to the Electoral College, but I turned it down
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
(268 Twitter engagements)
The above humor by Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat for comedy purposes only, November 2015. No Carsons were stabbed, no Republicans were hit by hammer, no conservatives were struck by baseball bat; and no Democrats were interrogated by Benghazi committee in the generation of this joke. All of the above may be freely shared and used, but please include a link to this blog if you find that practical to your use.
So there you go. Thanks for reading this here, and thanks for 'voting' for the humor on Twitter. Now if you did like that we can do a bit more. First up. Statistics - this is Tomi Ahonen’s blog after all, and there has to be math. How else can we keep the evil Tea Party away from the blog haha... So yes. Over the weekend, I ended up creating 198 jokes of my own. Some were totally unfunny, had no reaction of any kind at all. Some were mildly amusing that one or a few people might have an ‘engagement’ as Twitter counts the combination of likes and retweets and friending, etc. And some of the jokes were rather popular, had from a handful of people liking them to about a dozen or more. And four were very popular that had over 100 engagements. So how many bombed totally? 78 jokes fell totally flat (39%). Hey, I am no professional comic. Then the mildly amusing ones? 57 jokes were appreciated by a handful of people (29%). But 63 jokes were considered funny by several people (32%). So 63 jokes had 10 engagements or more. Gosh, if I told those jokes one minute per joke, on a stand-up routine, it would be an hour’s monologue. An hour of funny jokes? And all (almost all) were invented/created on the spot this past weekend, inspired by that loonie politician and his behavior. Very many of my jokes that were ‘funny’ were reasonably original that I didn’t see a clearly similar joke on Twitter. This is quite amazing for me. I mean, I am no professional comic, I write books about tech stuff (and occasionally some deep political blogs articles).
For those who really want more of my weird sense of humor, ok, I will do the remaining 18 into the Top 30. These all received between 15 and 22 engagements. So now in declining order of popularity we start with number 13 and proceed to number 30:
18 MORE POPULAR JOKES IN DR BEN CARSON TOPICS
Authored by Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat
Ranked in declining order of popularity
Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton were corrupted into liberal socialism by that Funky Parliamentarian George Clinton
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Sinatra's song Mack the Knife was written about my youth. I suggested 'Mack' would sound better than Ben the Knife
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
I invented the twist but Chubby Checker found it too fast-paced and slowed it down
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Rumsfeld once told me that there are known knowns, and known unknowns; and then there are total morons
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
National healthcare is like slavery. National dental care is like prison for hard labor.
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Second World War caused a shortage of vowels in Croatia. They are still being hoarded by the evil Belgians
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
We'd be Cuba without Fox News. We'd be Mongolia without the Fishing channel. We'd be Zimbabwe without Shopping channel
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Trust me, I'm a doctor. The cure for cancer is.. tax cuts
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Kill Bill swordfights were loosely based on my life, after Tarantino heard story of my youth. He sensed my female side
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Cheney shooting his friend in the face? Thats just Dick wanting to upstage me after I stabbed my friend
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Satan also told Steve Jobs to create the most addictive gadget imaginable and to name it Jesusphone. He named it iPhone
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
There are lies. There are damned lies. And then there is Dr Ben Carson
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Prison makes you gay. Jailhouse Rock. So Elvis was gay
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Herbert Hoover invented the vacuum cleaner. He wanted to call it the Herber. I advised him to call it the Hoover instead
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Not many people were aware that Mitt Romney was actually weak in math. I calculated the 47% for him
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
I choreogrphed the Walk Like An Egyptian dance for the Bangles to help carry grain to the pyramids more easily
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Microsoft and Windows are only a myth, created by the liberal media, perpetuated by the PC police
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Also in my violent youth, I stabbed my grandpa with a breadknife and next hit my grandma on the head with a breadbox
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
The above humor by Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat for comedy purposes only, November 2015. No grain was raided from pyramids in the generation of this joke. All of the above may be freely shared and used, but please include a link to this blog if you find that practical to your use.
So that is the full Top 30. I really enjoyed my time. Also of course - we clearly need more stats here, to catch our breath - I counted the TIME involved. I created jokes only on two days, the third day my creativity ended totally. I have not thought of one more joke since Saturday. While I laughed reading hundreds more good jokes Sunday and still some more funny ones Monday, my own creativity had run its course and I could not create a genuinely new joke on this topic now if my life depended on it (but could easily create plenty of variations on the above jokes). Anyway. How many was it then. 198 jokes were done in a period of 32 hours over Friday and Saturday. It means I created an attempt of a fresh joke every 10 minutes (for two days straight). Of course many fell flat, but I managed a funny joke once every half hour or two per hour - for two full days of all waking hours. In terms of contributing to the Twitter flood, I would repost my funnier jokes a couple of times, in total I submitted 486 Tweets on the #BenCarsonWikipedia hashtag, so on average any joke was run nearly 2.5 times but in reality, the funny ones went 3 or 4 times and the unfunny ones only once. So did you want one more set? Have you caught your breath.
Ok, I will do one more set of 10 bonus jokes of mine. These were from those ranked 20-63 ie each of these had at least 10 engagements but not more than 14. But there are a few, that I really liked myself, which I am kind of proud of and think they are funny (or just really weird, which can be nearly the same thing for me) and most of these are quite far off the main themes on the hashtag. So these are, you could say, ‘honorable mentions’ and ‘jury favorites’ when the jury is me, myself and I. In totally no particular order, here are the 10 that I felt should have done better than fall outside the Top 30:
BONUS SET OF 10 MORE ORIGINAL JOKES AROUND TOPIC OF DR BEN CARSON
Authored by Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat
Selected by author as deserving 'honorable mention' while not being in Top 30 most popular
I wrote the lyrics to the Beatles I Am The Taxman as an early warning about Obamacare
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
The Great Wall of China was built by my uncle, Uncle Ben (known for his rice). Wall used to store... grain
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
I actually visited West Point to decide. I noticed in a West End town, a dead-end world, East End boys & West End girls
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
A 'Soviet Union' is how Romneycare was merged to Obamacare, If the patients had been armed, they would not be in slavery
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
My tax plan didn't square with the math. So I went to the Bermuda Triangle and recalculated. All errors vanished.
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
Obama? like Hitler. Ayatollah? Hitler. Fidel & Raul Castro? Hitler & Hitler. Hillary? Female Hitler. Putin? Like Jesus
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
The original title of 007 Tomorrow Never Dies was 007 Bencarson Never Lies, but I had to turn down the role
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
When I visited Sarah Palin in Alaska, she pointed to the horizon, that is Russia. I said it wasn't. It was the pyramids
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
I'm such a devout Adventist, my Days go to 8th
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
We'd be Cuba without Fox News; we'd be Legoland without the Disney Channel
Tomiahonen @tomiahonen
The above humor by Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat for comedy purposes only, November 2015. No assistance from Satan or Obamacare was used in the generation of this joke. All of the above may be freely shared and used, but please include a link to this blog if you find that practical to your use.
So thanks for reading. If you haven't read the 100 best jokes blog - they are far better than these. Please do read those as well. They are at this link 100 best jokes on Dr Carson topics. And if that is not enough, then go and read more on Twitter's hashtag #BenCarsonWikipedia.
Meanwhile.. if you want to read my previous blog about political humor related to this year, I did the cast analysis of this year's Clown Car, how actually most characters are recasts of past popular politicians now played by newer actors. It is here Clown Car is a Recast. My previous attempt at a series of Twitter-related jokes was with the Romnesia theme in 2012, the most popular Tweets from those jokes are here.
If you're interested in my political analysis, my just-finished major treatise of why Dr Ben Carson has such a strong following, written just earlier last week before this mess exploded, that I entitled 'Cult of Carson' is here. The previous political blog was the latest debate review, here. And a very detailed review of all candidates on both sides, in the first edition of the 2016 Form Book which is the first such analysis that covers all areas not just polling and funding but things such as the delegate math and home-field advantages, billionaire support etc The 2016 Form Book first edition for mid October, is here.
NOTE - the normal topic of this blog is mobile, tech and media. My latest analysis of the smartphone market is here.
DR BEN CARSON PRIMER
But before we get to the jokes, most who read this blog are not that intensely involved in US politics, that they won't quite understand the intensity of the outburst and why some of the issues might be subject matter to jokes. So lets do a brief overview of Dr Ben Carson first, the factual side leading to this, so you understand, and you will have the context to also appreciate the jokes more. I will be brief...
Dr Ben Carson is a genuine world-class brain surgeon .He performed some pioneering operation on separating Siamese twins for example. He is now retired and he now writes books and does speeches. Apparently most if not all his speeches are to non-medical audiences, various political and religious groups. Dr Carson is the current leader in the polls for the Republican nomination. He is extremely religious, a member of the protestant Christian denomination known as Seventh Day Adventists. Dr Carson believes in the literal interpretation of the Bible so he believes the world is only 6,000 years old and that all the stories in the Bible are literally true. Again, nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does mean he is quite extreme.
It gets more hairy with how he speaks about it. So a medical doctor, ie a scientist. How does Dr Carson think evolution squares with his interpretation of the events in the Bible. Dr Carson believes that Satan corrupted Charles Darwin to perpetuate the fraud of evolution. (Yeah, that is how he believes it). Then it gets worse. He - a medical doctor - won't accept the almost unanimous medical community view that being gay is not voluntary. That you are 'born that way'. Dr Carson thinks - and he says this frequently - that being gay is a choice. He recently said that evidence of that is that when people go to prison they turn gay there. And now the worst we learned that was some of the best fuel for the jokes. Dr Carson thinks all archeologists and all Egyptologists are wrong, that Dr Carson's wacky theory is instead correct - that the Egyptian Pyramids were built as grain storage. Yes, this is the leading candidate that the Republican party voters think should be president. All scientists are wrong and Dr Carson - who is not in any way an amateur Pyramid student who would have lived months there studying them, just by his 'logic and reasoning' has come to the conclusion that hundreds of years of study, and recent things such as radar images of the pyramids, plus the TEXTS IN THE PYRAMIDS written by the builders - are all wrong. They are not burial temples, they are grain storage buildings (even as the stone walls are totally sold with no space to store anything).
This is not something that a young teenager crazy Dr Carson once said and long since has abandoned. He was saying these Pyramid theories still this year (as well as the gay choice and Darwin and Satan) and when he is confronted that all Egyptologists agree on the commonly accepted view, he says he doesn't care, he is convinced he is correct. So this is delusion. Then lets take the other part. His weird stories about his own past.
You need to know, if you have not seen him talk, that Dr Ben Carson, a big black man in his 60s, speaks in the most quiet voice, almost in whispers, and he speaks excruciatingly slowly. I am sure no normal person meaning someone who is not at their death bed, or is not clinically insane, speaks normally slowly as Dr Ben Carson does. But listen to him, watch him speak, it is the slowest and most quiet of anyone in politics. So he is a 'gentle' man, very mild-mannered, extremely soft-spoken. He also often has his eyes closed when he speaks, as if he was reaching inside his brain, or perhaps, he is nearly in a trance. A massive contrast to almost all politicians even under normal years, even more so now in the year of Donald Trump, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina. Because Dr Carson is the most religiously fanatical, extremist politician this year in the race, he is more extreme religious than the former Baptist Preacher and former Governor Mike Huckabee, as well as more religious than the former Senator Rick Santorum - the extreme 'evangelical and born-again' Christian wing of the Republican party absolutely love Dr Carson. And what they regularly point out is that they love the WAY he speaks. In addition to often WHAT he says, they all love HOW he speaks. He speaks so gently with that doctor's bed-side speaking tone. They don't like the hostility in politics and Dr Ben Carson's voice is nearly hypnotic, it is so soothing.
So Dr Carson has a reputation for being gentle, intelligent and .. wise. It is what his fervent followers use time and gain, Dr Carson is so wise. And they love it, that Dr Carson has undergone a religious transformation in his youth.
That sounded weird, didn't it. Yes. Dr Ben Carson is known to have been a violent juvenile delinquent as a teenager, so dangerous he attacked classmates with knives, bricks, chains-with-locks and even a baseball bat. He once attacked a friend with a knife with intent to kill, stabbed him but a metal belt buckle saved the victim's life. Also he once attacked his mother with a hammer. A very troubled and indeed dangerous young thug. The kind of bully we all remember from school, made all the more frightening as he is clearly a large black man, and often speaks to rooms where everybody else is white. So the image of this man five decades earlier as the kind of gangster-youth is vivid and frightening. But as he speaks in that quiet, patient, slow voice, he is not the least bit threatening. And he retells that story of redemption all the time because at age 14, he discovered Christ and repented and changed overnight. This is exactly the perfect story of a religious miracle that the extremely religious love to hear and are vulnerable to believe. Yes, they are gullible to this very type of story. Because they have to believe it, it has been in a movie life story of Dr Ben Carson. And its been chronicled in his books. It has to be true. And what a life-affirming, religiously motivating story. A genuine miracle. From homicidal pathological juvenile delinquent, to Yale University, to medical school, to world-famous brain surgeon. God works in mysterious ways.
Except that is all bullshit. Last week the story started to unravel on Thursday when first news broke that CNN had gone to interview 10 of Dr Carson's classmates, all the way back to elementary school and up to high school. They all tell the same story. That young Ben Carson was a kind, quiet guy, who studied hard, was a bookworm, had thick spectacles, wore a plastic pen-protector for his shirt pocket (a sure sign of being a geek and the object of riducle by the bullies of his class, not the sign of being a bully himself) and that there was no incident that anyone remembers of him attacking anyone. Not with even his hands, far less baseball bats, bricks, chains-and-locks, or a knife. The whole story of the miraculous religious transformation is a crock. He has fabricated an imaginary youth so that religious gullible audiences would accept him to come speak to their events about religious miracles and conversion and motivation.
And it gets worse, He wrote in his books and regularly bragged about while he was accepted to Yale University, he also supposedly met General Westmoreland when he visited Detroit one year, and the General offered young Ben Carson a 'full scholarship' to the US Military Academy, at West Point. So he would become a professional officer in the US Army. And that Dr Carson then turned down this offered scholarship and went to study medicine instead.
Again total bullshit. There is no special scholarship to West Point like there are to almost all other universities, because like I believe in most other countries too, to study at the military officer school is free of charge for all. There are no scholarships. There is, instead, a four year (or longer) commitment after graduation to serve as an officer in the army. Duh. No scholarships. And yeah, maybe an exaggeration, but then the General. He wasn't IN DETROIT at the date Dr Carson talks about. Politico has last week been digging into this story and by Friday we knew that the Dr Ben Carson campaign had to admit, actually Ben Carson never applied for West Point, he was never offered a scholarship. This after Politico of course went to West Point enrollment recods and found no application for Ben Carson was ever accepted (to suggest he had gotten perhaps just the standard free tuition) and that no such application was never submitted. And that you can't get into West Point without a sponsor from US Senate or Congress or other high official, and no such sponsor offer letter was on record either - definitely not from General Westmoreland.
And it keeps getting worse, then there is the story of heroism when during the Martin Luther King riot in Detroit, black violent youth/reformed former youth, protected two white kids from violence. Again utter bullshit. Wall Street Journal has dug through the past and found no such evidence either. So this is our man. He now resorts to saying 'I am not a pathological liar' which to me, only goes to prove more that he is. A normal innocent man who honestly didn't lie about ANY of those things, would only say 'I didn't lie' on the one item. Only a man who is regularly caught out on frequent lies, will then go to the 'at least am not always lying, I may have lied once before, but am not now lying' route. We all know someone like that, who always lies. That is the person who resorts in desperation to the 'I am not a PATHOLOGICAL liar' which almost certainly means he is. Then there is of course the story about Popeyes restaurant. When someone asked him about modern gun violence, Dr Carson said people should all rush the attacker, and that he was not afraid, in his past, he was held at gun-point at Popeyes restaurant, but he calmly told the robber that actually the cashier has the money, not him (a customer). Yeah. Nice guy. Go kill the other one.. (this story has not been verified either, no Popeyes has any record of such thing in Detroit). Also Dr Ben Carson loves to make analogies to Hitler, analogies to the Holocaust and slavery. Like that Obamacare is like slavery or the USA would be Cuba without Fox News. That sort of things. Can't call them strictly wrong but they are of course wacko and give plenty of fodder for jokes.
So this is the context. Pyramids are grain storage, Prison makes you gay, Satan convinced Darwin to create the lies about evolution. And young Ben Carson was a violent youth who attacked classmates with knives, bats, bricks, etc. And he attacked his mom with a hammer. And he was invited to West Point on a full scholarship by none other than General Westmoreland. And he heroically defended some white kids during the riots. Meanwhile equally 'brave' man then calmly tells gun-armed robbers to rob the OTHER guy not him. Now this man - clearly a smart, gentle, trustworthy, honest, wise man is running for President. And he is leading the polling. So when the truth started to emerge, Twitter went crazy creating a comedic treasure trove of other things Dr Ben Carson might have said, or soon will say.
Seventh Day Adventists may not be Protestants. One of the early Adventist writers was regarded as a Prophet. Protestant Churches draw their inspiration from Martin Luther, not directly from God.
The Seventh Day Adventists believe that before Christ comes back to Earth, that they will be persecuted by a union of the United States Government and the Roman Catholic Church. How that belief would cause Doctor Carson to act, if he were President is unknown.
Of course you and I can't vote. But I've been pointing this out to some Conservative friends, and it troubles them too.
Posted by: Wayne Borean | November 12, 2015 at 12:36 AM