VICTORY LAP A ROMAN WALKS INTO A BAR, STICKS TWO FINGERS IN THE AIR AND SAYS FIVE BEERS, PLEASE! What’s so funny about this? If you look at the picture accompanying this joke you’ll see a Roman legionnaire and a pirate, or two people dressed like that. When I think of someone from ancient Rome, two images come to mind, one is that of a legionnaire or soldier, the other is that of a Roman citizen wearing a “toga,” the white sheet-like thing wrapped around his or her body. I settled on the legionnaire because in the picture he’s drinking a beer. The pirate has nothing to do with the joke. I could have gone with some fraternity types wearing togas while swilling, or drinking, mass quantities of beer, but it wasn’t in the spirit of the joke. So what’s with the fingers in the air? First of all let’s keep in mind that two fingers in the air as sign language has different significance in different countries. In England and the US, and some other countries too, it’s the Victory sign. “V is for victory” proclaimed Winston Churchill during World War II. In other cultures it’s kind of an obscene sign. For kids it means rabbit ears. In the joke it’s supposed to be a V, but remember the guy making the sign is a Roman, not a Brit or American. The next things you have to remember is that The Romans didn’t use the same numbering system we do nor did they write numbers the same way. In fact, they used letters to represent numbers. The letter “I” is one. The letter “X” is ten and the letter “V” is five. If they had to write a long number then all the letters got pushed next to each other. So 1943, instead of using 4 digits became MCMXLIII, for example. Back at the bar, our hero wanted 5 beers, so he just had to sign V for victory. Hopefully the bartender wasn’t roamin’ around the bar and could read Roman numerals. And THAT’s what’s so funny! This joke came from 2canberra radio on audioboo audioboo.fm/boos/1527008-victory-lap
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 23:24:53 +0000