PARENT-THESIS

What’s the difference between a monkey, an orphan, a prince and Bald Bill?
A monkey has a hairy parent, an orphan has nary a parent, a prince is an heir apparent, and Bald Bill has no hair apparent.

What’s so funny about this? In baseball when they play two games in a row, it’s called a double header, three games in a row would be a triple header. But they NEVER play four games in a row, but if they did it would be a quadruple header. Well, this isn’t baseball, but it is a quadruple header because we incorporate four, count ‘em, 1,2,3,4 puns all based on a homophonic relationship of the words. In the cartoon, we see a clown asking a monkey, an orphan, a prince and some guy named Bald Bill, what makes them all different. Maybe the clown should have added, “yet somehow still related”; because they are. Sure their differences are obvious and you could make a big list for each one of them. It’s their linguistic connection that makes this joke funny. The monkey tells the clown he has a h