Sci-fi movies? Ruined
Action moves? Ruined
Adventure Fiction books? Ruined
Relatively simple jokes that are supposed to provide humor? Ruined.
As an aspiring engineer,
I admit that I am a relatively good writer. While engineers are not always serious and stressed out to the max, the word "relative" is what is important here. Everyone has a range of intelligence; some love stupid humor, some like political humor, and others like puzzle-like jokes.
1.
The first relies on really simple ideas and most of the time, just making obvious, comical jokes about any topic. It usually does not require that much thought to understand.
2.
Political jokes are usually difficult to see the underlying comment being stated, and they are most often seen as comics. They have an initial joke, which is what you first think of when looking at the picture. Then you stare at it a little longer and realize that you really missed the bigger joke by any underlying references, maybe objects in the background or you do not know everything about the history it is referencing to so you miss important details. This whole area of jokes is not universal like the previous section of jokes, silly humor. For one to even know what is going on in the initial step, they need to have some kind of background in history and politics (which a lot of people either don't pay attention during those classes, or they have no interest in those topics).
3.
The third, puzzle-like jokes, involve abstract thinking most of the time. You would look for patterns or hidden clues that reveal the humorous part to the joke. Usually, these types of joke utilize play-on-words and poetically properties like alliteration for example. Although these types of jokes do not take much background knowledge, they do require a high level of strategic thinking.
When trying to tell an engineer any of these jokes, they will most likely understand the joke, but not respond in a humorous matter.
Think about what a general engineer has to learn. They have to know the HOWs and the WHYs of everything. When getting specific, each engineer has to know so many properties of a vast amount of solid objects, fluid objects, and chemicals.
As a Civil Engineering major,
I have to take mechanics and design courses for a plethora of materials and material types. I have to know how materials act under any circumstance, why they act that way based on their physical and chemical properties, and then apply it to any body of interest in reality.
These materials for me include but are not limited to timber, steel, concrete, soils, fluids, carbon fiber, any kind of alloys, plastics, and really any material we use to build our surroundings with.
Along with this type of knowledge, I also have to know the extensive history of math that accompanies these physical properties. I have an endless background in math and physics, which explains why something acts the way it does, all the way down to the particles.
With all of this knowledge, we look at reality analytically, with an acute attention to details. So, when listening to jokes that don't take relatively a lot of intelligence to understand, we over-analyze everything that is said.
Although we do have a sense of humor, these jokes don't stimulate our minds. They don't challenge us to think, which a lot of us want from our leisure time.
However, we do enjoy simple humor sometimes!
After long, tedious days, we love spending time doing something that doesn't take a lot of brain power. Mindless entertainment is sometimes what we need, just like any other person.
For me at least, I usually choose sleep over hours of this mindless entertainment because engineers do not have that much free time anyway. In the limited time we have during the day, we are either studying, working, eating, or sleeping. Therefore, in that minimal amount of time, we either want to further our intellectual mind outside of our studies or to not expend much energy on thinking at that moment (if we are not already passed out asleep at that point).
Overall, I just wanted to show how most people who think those in the engineering profession are uptight and serious all the time are mistaken. Engineers do enjoy all kinds of humor, we just have a unique perspective and habit that causes us to think too much. We are very fun people, but we just need to be serious sometimes too!
