One of a kind

Q: Why is there only one Eiffel Tower?
A: Because it eats its young.

I've been telling this joke to everyone I know for the past few days, with mixed results. Mostly it has been received in puzzled silence. My son-in-law laughed, but only after my daughter handed him the phone with the words, "Mom wants to tell you a joke and you're sort of required to laugh." Would he have laughed otherwise? He's an engineer, so maybe so.

I encountered the joke in the book Engaging Humor by Elliott Oring, who is known for having written the definitive account of the history of the dumb blond joke. "Blond Ambition and Other Signs of the Times" is required reading when I teach humor theory, but I've never read the chapter in which he introduces the Eiffel Tower joke. He analyzes the joke in a brutally humorless paragraph that includes the following helpful statement: "Since the Eiffel Tower is not a living organism, it does not eat or reproduce anything, and it seems absurd to explain its singularity in such terms."

Well, duh.

But even after Oring takes scalpel in hand to subject the joke to this brutal dissection, I still find it funny. (The joke, not Elliott Oring, whose name rhymes with...never mind. Cheap shot.) That's right: for me, the Eiffel Tower joke remains impervious to the depredations of the humor theorist.

Which is why I find it odd that others do not share my delight. It eats its young! What a perfect answer! I picture a monstrous Mommy Eiffel giving birth to little baby towers only to gobble them right up before they can leave the nest. I get the giggles just thinking about it, but then I tell the joke and meet a blank stare and try to explain and I end up sounding like Elliott Oring.

Boring!

Am I the only one who finds this joke funny? Am I doomed to spend my days emitting humorless explanations about the reproductive habits of a tourist attraction? The Eiffel Tower and I have this in common: we're one of a kind. Except I don't eat my young. I just bore them to death.