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Bad C Pun Contest Results

Stan Kelly-Bootle

Stan Kelly-Bootle has written the "Devil's Advocate" column in UNIX Review since 1984. He is the author of 12 books including The Devil's DP Dictionary, Mastering Turbo C, and, just out from SYBEX, Understanding UNIX Stan has judged the Bad C Pun contest since its debut.

There are those who consider the pun to be the lowest form of wit; indeed some consider bad pun to be a tautology. Yet such is the subtlety of Homo risibilus that much merriment can be extracted from really atrocious jokes and puns. The Annual C Users Journal Bad C Pun Contest is based on this premise and each year the entries have grown both in number and outrageously poor taste. Could it be that the agonies of a convoluted syntax promote a gallows-humor escapism in our C- programming community?

The third CUJ Bad C Pun Contest was the worst, or in other words the best, so far. It would be nice to claim that we had a fair, scientific ajudgement algorithm (or some sort of groan-o-meter, perhaps), but in fact the selection process is quite subjective. Robert and Donna Ward make pass one to remove entries that duplicate previous winners. They also remove the strange submissions that seem entirely unrelated to C or puns or anything: one suspects that some contestants take bad to include irrelevant. Also expunged are those that already enjoy a wide circulation (we always receive at least twenty "O say can you C?"s and fifty "From C to shining C"s). The survivors are then cast into three heaps: bad, worse, and worser. I read all these, and after much puking and soul-searching, pick the ten winners (aka losers): Gold, Silver, Bronze, and seven consolation prizes.

Push me the envelope, Donna. Fanfare. And the winners for 1992 are:

Number 10

(sung to the tune of "On the Good Ship Lollipop")

On the Good C_ push 'n pop_ it's a heap free_ to the ANSI shop_ where bounds bounds play_ on the static Pool of memory bay;

Assembler stacks_ everywhere_ computer hacks_ fill them there_ And here you are_ happy ANDing on an integer FAR;

See the Turbo C_ do a DDE_ with the big bad_C windows there_ If you push too much_ oops! oops! You'll get an o'erflow err:

On the Good C_ push 'n pop_ Dennis Ritchie_ into Bell you'll hop_ with this command "All aboard for C LAN land."

from John St. Clair, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Number 9

UNIX is an operating C stem.

from Claudio Puviani, Sainte-Foy, PQ, Canada

Number 8

golfer = &ball;
—Golfer addressing the ball

Garbage: :~Garbage()
—garbage disposal

free (Wozniak);
free (Jobs);
—throwing away an apple core

class Yourself
{
private:

   void Washing(boolean linenDirty);
};
—don't wash your dirty linen in public

from Stephen Goudge, Bristol, England

Number 7

Did you hear about the C+ + programmer whose girlfriend broke up with him because he treated her like an object?

from Paul H. Smith, Petuluma, CA

Number 6

"I come to bury C, sir — not to praise it." — attributed to Niklaus Wirth

from Eric J. LeVasseur, Moreno Valley, CA

Number 5

Q: What did the C programmer say when they told him to code in Pascal?

A: "Oh no! Give me a BREAK!"

Q: What did the Pascal programmer say when they told him to code in C?

A: "I'd rather fight than SWITCH!"

from Mark Harrison, Richardson, TX

Number 4

Q: What's the C programmer's answer to the famous question "To be or not to be..."?

A: 0xFF (that is 0x2B [SYM] ~0x2B) (assuming char arithmetic)

from Dan Butterfield, Bedford, TX

Bronze (Number 3)

#ifdef Get_A_Hearing_Aid

from Phil Glatz, Incline Village, NV

Silver (Number 2)

The patron saint of portable programmers: Saint Francis of AN-SI C.

from Paul Spain, Northcote, VIC Australia

Gold (Number 1)

Q: What do you get when you assign (char) 0 to Arnold Schwarzenegger?

A: A Null Terminator.

from David Millman, Shelton, CT

The prizes this year are:

There were seven consolation prizes consisting of a one-year subscription to CUJ and a T-Shirt. My thanks, and curses, to all entrants. Look out for the next Call for Puns in a future issue of CUJ. And remember, you don't have to be present at the awards ceremony to qualify for a prize.