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

Three men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices far." So he leans over the basket and yells out, "Helllloooooo! Where are we?" (They hear the echo several times.)

Fifteen minutes pass. Then they hear this echoing voice: " Helllloooooo! You're lost!!" One of the men says, "That must have been a statistician." Puzzled, one of the other men asks, "Why do you say that?" The reply: "For three reasons. (1) he took a long time to answer, (2) he was absolutely correct, and (3) his answer was absolutely useless."

*Does this truly characterize a good statistician? This bit of humor has been floating around for sometime. Sorry I don't have an attribution for it.

Here are two variants of an old standard:

Some say that if you laid all the statisticians on the face of the earth end to end it would be a very good thing.

Others note that if you laid all the statisticians end to end, two thirds would be under water.

*A big thank you to David Hitchin for two cute twists.

A statistician is someone who is skilled at drawing a precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.

*This one has been rattling around in my brain but I seem to have trashed the email of the kind person that sent me this. Someone please step forward and claim this!

Statisticians are like the drunk leaning against the lamp pole - they are there for support not illumination.

*This is one of my favorites. Thanks to Jim Hume again by way of Karen Scheltema.

Then there's the one that if you laid every statistician on the face of the earth end to end you would't reach a conclusion.....Probably.

*Again I could not find the attribution on this witty short one.

Statistics are like a bikini; What is revealed is interesting; What is concealed is crucial.

Thanks go out to R. Taylor for this little tidbit.

Definition of a Statistician: A Mathematician broken down by age and sex.

*Another Hugh Foley jewel.

THE TOP TEN REASONS TO BECOME A STATISTICIAN

Deviation is considered normal.
We feel complete and sufficient.
We are "mean" lovers.
Statisticians do it discretely and continuously.
We are right 95% of the time.
We can legally comment on someone's posterior distribution.
We may not be normal but we are transformable.
We never have to say we are certain.
We are honestly significantly different.
No one wants our jobs.

*This one was sent anonomously through my Guestbook.

And there was the statistician who was asked how her husband was and replied "Compared with whom?"

*Almost forgot this quickee from the same Ronan Conroy. Thanks!

Old statisticians never die they just become nonsignificant.

*This is my own quote. My students tell me I am only significant at the .10 level so how am I to interpret this?

A mathematician, applied mathematician and a statistician all apply for the same job. At the interview they are asked the question, what is 1+1. The mathematician replies, "I can prove that it exists but not that it is unique." The applied mathematician after some thought replies, "the answer is approximately 1.99 with an error in the region of 0.01." The statistician steps outside the room, mulls it over for several minutes, and eventually in desparation returns and inquires, "so what do you want it to be?"

*A big thank you goes out to Mike Greyling of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa for this revealing joke.

Why did Yogi Bear become a statistician?

Because he discovered that truth could be inferred on the basis of bare facts.

*Thanks go out to Alfred M. Barron for this joke that is barely funny!

A traveler trudged down a dusty road alongside a pasture. Seeing a shepherd shouting and whistling at his sheepdog rounding up a flock of sheep, the traveler shouted "I BET YOU A HUNDRED BUCKS AGAINST ONE OF YOUR SHEEP I CAN GUESS THE SIZE OF YOUR FLOCK."

The shepherd agreed to the bet. The traveler then yelled loudly, "Nine hundred forty two," exactly the number in the flock.

The traveler then picked out his prize and trudged down the road, but the shepherd shouted after him: "I BET I KNOW WHAT YOU DO!"

The traveler agreed to another wager about this matter, and the shepherd then stated, "You're a STATISTICIAN."

The traveler was startled. "How did you know?????"

The shepherd replied, "Well, put down my dog, and I'll tell you."

*Thanks to George Moxley of Virginia Commonwealth University for contributing this joke to the Gallery. Most of my friends failed to see any humor in this anecdote. I guess only statisticians with a sheepdog would understand the levity here!

We all have heard that statisticians lie with statistics. What do insomniacs do with statistics?

They kick them out of bed!!!!

*Does that mean insomniacs never count sheep? I hope you like my twist to this old notion about statisticians.

What is the difference between an introverted and extraverted statistician?

The introverted statistician stares DOWN at his shoes whereas the extraverted statistician stares OVER at your shoes!!!

*Well you have to admit the angle of sight has been elevated a tad but then statisticians are a pretty repressed profession. However, I can take great comfort in what a wise man once said, "You can tell a lot about the character of a man by the appearance of his shoes." For all you so-called "Experts on Shoes" try this little fun test The New and Improved Expert Shoe Salesperson Quiz.

ARGUING WITH A STATISTICIAN IS A LOT LIKE WRESTLING WITH A PIG. AFTER A FEW HOURS YOU BEGIN TO REALIZE THE PIG LIKES IT.

*We now know that statisticians, among their many other outstanding talents, are also skilled debaters. Thanks go out to Steve Carlson of Bedford, NH for forwarding this joke to me.

A young woman is telling her friend about a new man she is dating. The friend says, "What does he do for a living?"

"He's a statistician," the first girl replies.

"A statistician? Wallowing in numbers all day? He must be awfully boring!" says the friend.

"We-ell," says the first girl defensively, "It's not the numbers that matter. I Love what he does with them."

*Erica Heffernan sent this joke to me all the way from Sydney, Australia to conteract some of the "lame" jokes in the Gallery. Thanks, Erica but I may have to mail you a single crutch for this one. Any comments from the readers?

You can always TELL a statistician,

But you cant tell him much!!

*I might add that if you tell a statistician TOO MUCH he would feel cheated out of making an inference. Thanks once again to Doc Finstuen for this truism from "ALAMO" country in Texas.

SOME BEHAVIORAL TRAITS OF A STATISTICIAN TO PONDER

(1) Picks the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 , 5, and 6 in the State Lottery.
*Hey, what's wrong with these? This set of six numbers is just as likely as any other set of six numbers from 1-52 such as 35, 8, 44, 23, 32, and 10! A statistician just likes order in his life.

(2) Carries a Brannock Device (See Shoe Quiz) in his car trunk rather than a small air compressor.
*It is more important that his passengers have correct fitting shoes rather than having the correct amount of air pressure in his tires!

(3) Loves riding a roller coaster because the quick ups and downs remind him of his arm motions when drawing normal curves on the blackboard.
*Now if he could only draw a straight score-scale line on the board he would have it made!

(4) Displays fickleness when he relishes showing his class that in baseball, Pete Rose's 44 game hitting streak was slightly more improbable than Joe Dimaggio's 65 game hitting streak but yet would vote to keep Rose out of the Hall of Fame.
*What? This is unbelievable! The key is that Rose had a lifetime batting average of .300 whereas Dimaggio's was .325 and this differential does not overcome the more games that Rose played in that season.

(5) Shows an almost exclusive preference for hypothesis testing over confidence intervals in making inferences as most applied statisticians do. But then is speechless when a student remarks ,"But sir, if we reported confidence intervals then we wouldn't have to fuss with Type I and II Errors or the Power of the test!"
* How true! How true! But we must always support Neyman and Pearson and forever keep their names in front of the statistical community.

SOME BEHAVIORAL TRAITS OF A STATISTICIAN TO PONDER-PART II

(1) Does not like to to be first or last to arrive at a party for fear of being an outlier.
*It is the old principle of recency vs primacy for a psychologist but the statistician doesn't subscribe to either option. Arrival somewhere in the middle of the pack makes the statistician anonymous.

(2) Is obsesssed with how many miles per hour a human hair grows!
*Many people still believe that hair just doesn't grow in miles per hour. But a mile is a length measure just as much as a millimeter is. It is simply that most people do not relate to very large or very small numbers. The actual calculation states that human hair grows at a rate of 10 ^-8 or .00000001 miles per hour. What should the barbers do about this rate?

(3) Tends to follow other people when walking in a group because of a strong leaning toward a posteriori tests after rejecting the overall H₀.
*Rarely do you see a priori tests in the literature particularly in the behavioral sciences. Could it be that statisticians do not want to perform ahead of time?

(4) Becomes despondant when lecturing on the normal curve because he knows down deep in his lifetime he will never encounter an EXACTLY normal set of real-life discrete scores.
*The normal curve is a very specific mathematical function that involves a continuous variable. Some real-life distributions can only hope to APPROXIMATE this model. How sad!!

(5) As a behavioral-science statistician, harbors deeply rooted jealousy of a biometrician because the latter is blessed with ratio or interval scale data while the former muddles around with ordinal and nominal data.
*This is a fact of life but many in the behavioral sciences would cite all the robustness studies of parametric tests and say, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!!"

What happens if you find the inverse of a variance-covariance matrix?

You get an upside down statistician balancing on his head and looking up and admiring his black patent leather wing-tipped shoes. Since he was now nonsingular his friends were anxious to mingle with him and free him from his reputation as an introvert.

*At last we got a statistician to look up at his shoes instead of down. Now to his friends the shoes were at eye level and gave off a brilliant glossy sheen. What an impressive scene that was the epitomy of class! The friends finally understood why shoes are the best measure of a person's character.