My Year of Laffy Taffy: Days 2 – 7

Taffyverse days 2 - 7 thumbnail

Day 2

Strawberry. Hard as a rock. And here I had thought things would be smooth sailing. Instead, I nearly lost a filling.

Q: Why did the GPS coordinate get kicked out of class?

A: He had a bad latitude

This one is actually not awful. I’d even consider giving it the highest compliment a Laffy Taffy joke can receive: almost decent.

Q: What did the miner think about this joke?

A: He dug it.

This one is actually awful.

Day 3

Banana. What? There are only four flavors in this bucket, I didn’t want to be going back to apple again so soon, and I didn’t realize until day 5 that Strawberry and Cherry were different flavors here – their wrappers are identical in color. Anyway, my fans demand integrity and balance. And of course, this one was soft, supple, tantalizingly yielding under my tongue… *cough* maybe banana isn’t so bad after all…?

Q: What is free and full of teeth?

A: A smile

I kind of see where they were going with this at a wholesome angle, but it’s less a joke and more something a creepy man says to a woman on the subway.

Q: What shoe type can’t decide?

A: Flip Flops

Mmm I don’t have any notes for this one. It passes muster for Laffy Taffy. Interestingly, I have noticed they don’t put the name or age of the person who submitted the jokes on the wrapper anymore… I assume because no one submits them anymore and they’re stolen by the Wonka brand’s minions from 70 year old Bennett Cerf joke books.

Day 4

Well I had to pick a flavor I’ve had before now, sue me. This time it really was random though. Of course the fates have it out for me and it turned out to be banana. Again, at least it’s soft. Not a great desert today but I must have been a bad boy.

Q: How is a USB like an elephant?

A: They both have memory skills.

Another nonsensical one – USB isn’t inherently a storage device, it’s just an industry standard interface that allows data or power transfer. Even if the joke read “hard drive” instead of “USB”, drives don’t have memory skills. They have memory storage. I’d believe this one came from a five year-old – in the immortal words of that one VW commercial: “You get an F.”

Q: Why did the traffic light turn red?

A: It was embarrassing to change in the street.

All right, credit where credit is due. This one made the palest ghost of a shadow of a smile appear on my face. Or maybe it was a trick of the light.

Day 5

Lunchtime – what better to have than a healthy serving of apples? Something to keep the doctor away, which may be true, but certainly not the dentist. I can almost hear him rubbing his hands with glee as I peel back the wrapper…

Q: How is a bad joke like a broken pencil?

A: They have no point.

How is the joke above me like a broken pencil? It’s a bad joke.

Q: What did one eye say to the other?

A: Between us something smells

Another brainmelter. So many things wrong with this – grammatical structure, lack of a punchline, the implication that “between us something smells” is a common turn of phrase? This wrapper needs to be immolated in the fires of Mount Doom.

Day 6

As I crack into my first Cherry – now that I know it exists, and recall that it’s actually the best of the flavors – I can’t believe I committed to this for a year. Hopefully the taffy jokes really start stepping up and carrying these posts, because I don’t know if I can be non-repetitive enough in my excerpts to make 52 of these posts.

Q: What’s full of flowers but also a snake?

A: A garden.

This one perplexed me – and considering this is but one of several that have just this first week, I wonder… am I the stupid one? Am I unable to make heads or tails of these “jokes”? The wording of the question seemed to imply the answer would be “full of flowers” and also literally or figuratively “be” a snake. I was expecting something like “your mother-in-law” or similar type of play on words of snake, but perhaps the interpretation here is the garden is “full of flowers” (true) and “full of snake” (plausible, not guaranteed, snake should also have been plural). Garbage tier joke.

Q: What type of line is not spoken or drawn?

A: On-line.

I can’t do this. Laffy Taffy is a psy-op by the CIA to induce readers to suicide.

See you tomorrow.

Day 7

Mmm, cherry. So nice, had to have it twice – in a row. Let’s see if the jokes will be similarly tasty.

Q: What button can’t unbutton?

A: Your belly button.

Well, technically not true, but the truth might be a little too gory for a whimsical taffy wrapper.

Q: What 3 letters hold a lot of data?

Oh… no no no wait wait wait!

A panicked Punisher says "No No No Wait Wait Wait Wait" in this gif.

A: USB

And there it is. Another fundamental misunderstanding of USB. If you’re the kind of person who also doesn’t get the difference between the shapes of the connectors you plug into your phones/computers and the actual place data is stored, please avail yourself of the Wikipedia article on it. You might save a life when you send jokes to Laffy Taffy – mine.


This has been January 2 – 7 of my journey through the Taffyverse. You can catch the rest of it in a chronological list over at the index.

My Year of Laffy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Eat the Taffy

I’ve decided to do something new with this blog. While I do plan to release some new, typical blog post content this year, I’ve had an idea for an interesting bit floating around my brain for over five years. What if I consumed a piece of Laffy Taffy every day for a year straight, reviewing the jokes on the wrappers? Something no one asked for, no one wanted, just like me. I’ll consolidate these posts in a weekly format, but the first day deserves a special call-out.

Let’s dive in.

Day 1

I open the 145 piece tub of red 40, and probably 1 – 39 as well, and am immediately hit with a chemical smell of some kind of preservative. Formaldehyde, most likely, but I’ve always wanted to get a head-start on my embalming. After a year’s worth of Laffy Taffy, I’ll probably be pretty close to dead anyway.

Picking a piece completely at random, making sure it’s not banana, I select sour apple. If only there were more than four flavors in this container, and if only more than three of them were any good.

Joke 1

Q: What’s a baseball player in a hot air balloon?

A: Batter up.

At first I thought the grammar of this one seemed funky, but after some thought I realized it’s just an awful joke that my brain was trying to find some semblance of sense in. It technically works, linguistically speaking, but when you’re having to get into the technicalities of jokes, it’s already failed as a piece of humor.

Joke 2

Q: What do you call a clown with a psych degree?

A: A funcologist.

This one actually broke my brain. It appears the “funny” lies in the assumption that you can replace the “psych” in “psychologist” with any other word, even if it doesn’t rhyme or sound similar in any way. I imagine the punchline would have had exactly the same weight if it had been “a jestercologist” which is to say, none at all.

The hard part of my job for the day done, I ate the sour apple taffy. Softer than I was expecting, thankfully. Historically I’ve bought packages where only the banana had a consistency and temperature something north of an icicle, but we’re off to a good start here.

One day down. 364 to go.