14 jokes only intellectuals will really understand

Prove you're the smartest person in the room by laughing at these jokes.

We've all heard it, the 'Shakespearean tittering', the moment in a theatre when roughly 200 middle class people all pretend to find a topical joke, written 400 years ago, much funnier than it actually is.

This is all part of proving how much of an intellectual you one is. It's a blessing but also a curse. Those suffering under this burden will be glad to know there is a safe space for these jokes, and it's called reddit.

Here are fourteen jokes you'll only understand if you're a lover of the fine arts, or if you slip into French all the time 'par erreur'.

OR if you just learn basic joke construction, you can learn to laugh and nod knowingly at exactly the right moment.

1.

A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers and says:

Five beers please.

2.

A surly English workman is standing at the entrance to a construction site in London. It’s a filthy, wet day. He sees approaching him a shabby figure, with clay pipe clenched in mouth and a battered raincoat, and thinks, "Another effing Mick" on the scrounge.

The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there’s any casual job going.

“You don’t look to me," says the supervisor, "as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist."

"I do, too," says the Irishman indignantly. "The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses."

3.

Is anyone else here solipsistic, or is it only me?

4.

Three statisticians go hunting. They see a deer and the first one shoots, hitting three feet left of the deer. The second one shoots, hitting three feet right of the deer. The third one leaps up in joy, yelling, "we got him!"

5.

Jurisprudence fetishist gets off on technicality.

(HT. The Onion)

6.

A philosopher asserted in a lecture that, whereas in many languages a double negative makes a positive, in no language does a double positive make a negative.

Instantly, from the back of the room, a voice piped up, “Yeah, yeah.”

7.

A mathematician is heading to a house party. Just as he is coming up to the house, he notices there are no cars parked nearby, and all the lights in the house turned off.

Just then, he sees two people enter, and shortly afterwards he sees three people leave.

So he walks up and goes into the house, only to find it empty.

8.

Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness.

He says to the waitress:

I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.

The waitress replies:

I'm sorry, Monsieur, but we're out of cream. How about with no milk?

9.

Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar.

Heisenberg turns to the other two and says:

Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it's funny or not?

Gödel replies:

We can't know that because we're inside the joke.

Chomsky says:

Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong.

10.

How do you know when some HTML has been written by a basic programmer?

All Style, No Class.

11.

Labour MP Dennis Skinner stood up in Parliament and said:

Half the Tories opposite are crooks!

He was forced to withdraw the statement, so he said:

OK, half the Tories opposite are NOT crooks.

12.

Don't invite Piet Mondrian to your party.

I know he starts out by making a great impression, but after a little while he becomes a real square.

13.

Helium walks into a bar and the bartender says:

We don't serve noble gases here.

He doesn't react.

14.

Why does Rorschach only paint penises?

A previous version of this article appeared on indy100 in 2016 and was migrated for technical reasons.

More: Here are our favourite jokes about Brexit because everyone really just needs to laugh

More: 11 jokes only grammar nerds will understand