Jokes Today

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

I published a rant on grammar in This is True recently, which led to a bunch of people asking me if I had heard this joke -- or heard of the best-selling book that resulted from it. Oh yes, indeed both. First, the joke:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage.

The panda pauses on his way out, produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual, and tosses it over his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation:

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

- - -

The joke led to a book by Lynne Truss with the title -- yes! -- Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It not only discusses proper comma usage (and I sincerely hope you did understand that proper comma usage is the point of this joke!), its rant on apostrophes alone is worth the price of the book:

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