Day 8

Strawberry. You know it, you love it, clearly I haven’t gotten enough of it. It seems to be the only flavor with the general consistency of something above 9 on the Mohs hardness scale. I shatter my teeth, fillings, and crowns for you, dear reader.

Immensely bad, heavily reliant on the reader not only understanding that “surfing” here is a shortened form of “surfing the internet” but also the implication that browsing the internet constitutes research. Not in 2025, Wonka – the general population uses the internet strictly for posting misinformation and racism.

This is a joke my mother would love – I think it qualifies as an anti-joke, or (to quote the late great Elizabeth Comstock) something so like it, I cannot tell the difference. It’s mildy amusing, perhaps, if you’re not expecting it and aren’t completely sober.

Day 9

It’s another random taffy kind of day, and that means more Sour Apple. After choking down the artificial taste, I instinctively threw the wrapper away in what I can only assume was a subconscious act of self-preservation, before remembering my purpose.

Well I feel sorry for the individual who came up with this, because if they’re eating fast food for every lunch they’re in bigger trouble than if they ate Laffy Taffy every day for a year… Also the joke sucks.

This marks the first time in this series that the answer occurred to me without me even needing to think. It avoids most of the pitfalls of its predecessors: bad grammar, nonsensical, stupid, but it falls into what is arguably the worst one just as it almost crosses the finish line: It’s just not funny. And that’s a crime that calls for the writer to pay the ultimate price.

Also salsa doesn’t go on tacos, so a -2 to its final score as well.

Day 10

For breakfast I enjoy some pliable gooey paste vaguely flavored like a toddler’s imagination of cherry, then immediately wash my mouth out and brush my teeth before returning to review the jokes.

What kind of The Hobbit-ass riddle is this? The only way it could sound more dated if it was “Thirty white horse on a red hill”. This is the kind of joke Bilbo Baggins would tell at his going away party to make his neighbors hate him just a little more. This “joke” would have been old when ships were exclusively made out of wood. I think humans are born knowing the answer to this, but maybe once analog devices have vanished from this world the concept of clock hands will become forgotten knowledge…

This one… is all right. They got me right in the special interest, our delightful public library system. It’s a clever bit of wordplay subverting your expectation of the definition of the word “story” in the context of a building. It doesn’t make me laugh, but considering how low the bar is for a Laffy Taffy joke, I declare that it passes muster and the author may be spared during the coming joke war.

Day 11

Well, I certainly never would have come up with this answer. Honestly maybe one of my dear readers can explain this to me. An attempt to be a play on hash browns? Is there a similar synonym for potatoes I’m unaware of? Hash-bag? What on Earth is this tremendously bad joke? Who approved this?

Moving on.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a reference to The Phantom Tollbooth’s Spelling Bee, and thus – while not amusing – this gets a pass.

Day 12

Why is the strawberry flavor so hard?!?! By the time I’m done it feels like my jaw has gone through a workout regimen that would put prime Arnold Schwarzenegger to shame.

Another passable joke – a better synonym for “disarray” could probably have made the question flow a little better, but I do like the “mess” pun. No laugh but I did raise my eyebrows slightly at the unexpectedly decent joke.

It’s finally happened people – I smiled when I read this. And they said it would never come to pass. I could take umbrage with the cumbersome wording of the question, but that’s nitpicky stuff. “Whittle baby” is pretty good. So far, easily the best taffy wrapper I’ve read this year – but I’ve got so far to go, maybe this is a sign of better jokes to come.

Day 13

I’ve got the flu, and the last thing I want is to eat some Laffy Taffy. Hot tea and soup would hit the spot, but looks like I have no choice but to soldier on with my mission. And today, this brave warrior gets cherry. It’s soft, at least.

Ah, so close to having something here. Not a joke, but it loses points for grammar. I wasn’t 100% sure but something about that hyphen bothered me. I went to Google and found this determination from Grammarist:

“Breakup is one word when it’s a noun (e.g., it was a bad breakup) or an adjective (I’m writing a breakup song). It’s two words (break up) when it functions as a verb (I think we should break up). Some publishers use the hyphenated break-up in place of the one-word form.“

They could have gotten away with the hyphen IF it had been the noun usage, but alas – no points for almost using proper grammar. It’s the labor camps for the author, I’m afraid.

Ok, ok – I spent the time I didn’t laugh trying to poke holes into the mechanics of this joke, but it turns out it actually makes a little sense. I initially thought “What on Earth is a ‘phone friend’ – Something akin to a pen pal, one you don’t know personally but speak to regularly on the phone?” But then I realized (giving the writer the benefit of the doubt here) that it could be that the cable had a literal phone as a friend, in which case all is right with the world. The cable is sad that he’s no longer connected to the phone, and thus – in this strange alternate reality of sentient wiring – can no longer communicate with it.

Day 14

Finishing off this second week of the ‘verse with banana. So far I have kept my flavor consumption rotated fairly – I absolutely must not get to the end of this tub with a huge amount of strawberry and banana ahead of me.

Tries to do something new – predictable, but new, for Laffy Taffy at least. The second line sounds like kelp could imply another word though. Kelp yourself – NOW!

A dyslexia joke! How droll. I wonder if we’ll get the “sold his soul to Santa” one. Probably not.

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This has been January 8 – 14 of my journey through the Taffyverse. You can catch the rest of it in a chronological list over at the index.