GARY C. RAMSEYER'S FIRST INTERNET GALLERY OF STATISTICS JOKES BY TOPIC

Did you know that the great majority of people have more than the average number of legs? It's obvious really; amongst the 57 million people in Britain there are probably 5,000 people who have got only one leg. Therefore the average number of legs is:

((5000 * 1) + (56,995,000 * 2)) / 57,000,000 = 1.9999123

Since most people have two legs...

*Thanks to Joachim Verhagen's Science Jokes for this play upon numbers.

Did you hear about the statistician who had his head in an oven and his feet in a bucket of ice? When asked how he felt, he replied, "On the average I feel just fine."

*Thanks to George Litman for reminding me of the first statistics joke I had ever heard. This just might be the granddaddy of them all.

These two friends decide to go rabbit hunting with bow and arrows. They convince their friend, the statistician, to come along since he doesn't get out very much. The three wait patiently out in the woods for a rabbit to pass by. Suddenly a rabbit bolts across a clearing some distance away and races toward a dense patch of trees. The first hunter whips out his bow, strings an arrow, and lets fly. "Darn," he cries, "the arrow was a foot short." Just then the rabbit bolts across the clearing from the other side of the woods. The second hunter whips out his bow, strings an arrow, and lets fly. "Darn" complains the second hunter," the arrow went a a foot long." The rabbit once more emerges from the woods and races across the clearing. the statistician starts to raise his bow and then lowers it with a contemplative expression. He takes out the stub of a pencil, finds a crumpled envelope in a pants pocket, and quickly executes some calculations on the back of the envelope. Then he looks up, smiling, as the rabbit disappears for the final time and waves the envelope in the direction of the other two hunters. "Look at this -- if you take the mean distance that the arrows went, we got the rabbit!"

*A big thank you to Frederick M. Siem.

"When she told me I was average, she was just being mean".

* A big thanks for this quickee to Mike Beckman who is working on his Ph.D at Virginia Tech. Just wondered Mike if one of your professors told you this?

You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half the population is dumber than that!

*Thanks to Barbara Kerr from Australia for sending me this. She told me that this not-terribly-nice aphorism is attributed to the fictitious Bob Dobbs of the Church of the Subgenius.

Why are the mean, median, and mode like a valuable piece of real estate?

LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION!

*All you beginning students of statistics just remember that measures of central tendancy are all POINTS on the score scale as oppposed to measures of variability which are all DISTANCES on the score scale. Understand this maxim and you will always know where you are LOCATED!

A friend of mine told me the other day that my statistics students must really hate me. The friend informed me that a student complained to him that my last test was so hard that EVERYONE scored below the mean and even the standard deviation was NEGATIVE! The student, however, told my friend he was a wee bit optimistic. His score was so low that he just knew that it would regress toward the mean on the next test!!

*Well, I am proud that my test set two new world records in the annals of statistics. On the other hand, maybe I should carefully go over the teaching notes that cover these topics. Anyway, a big thank you goes out to Steven C. Marcus for suggesting this joke. Steve, I hope you don't mind the embellishments that were tacked on.

A new Ph.D statistician had just taken a position with the Bureau of Standards. One of his first tasks was to familiarize himself with the volumes of measurement standards for the vast array of objects in the world. He was immediately curious about his own profession and looked up "statistician." Among the list of physical characteristics, he came across a shocking figure...The mean weight of all statisticians in the world is 3 POUNDS. He gasped in disbelief. He thought surely this was a typographical error and that the first two digits had been omitted. Then he squinted and noticed a small asterisk by this figure. He quickly directed his eyes to the bottom of the page. He sighed a breath of relief as the footnote boldly stated, "INCLUDES URN."

*I think this easily EARNS a grade of "A" as a statistician joke. I now understand why textbooks and instructors are obsessed with examples of drawing Balls from Urns when probability theory is introduced. If you think this a lame joke, I will take all the blame but remember I am an Odd Ball that has always drawn Chips from Bowls.

I.R.S. statistics show that the average American now works 3 and 1/2 hours every day for the government, which comes out to 1 and 1/2 more hours than civil servants do!!

*This is really a shocker. I always knew civil employees were underpaid but there now appears to be a fringe benefit. I am sorry I don't have an attribution on this neat comparison.