I perform stand-up comedy as a side business, and people are often amazed that software engineers can have a sense of humor or that there are things to joke about in the world of computing.

I agree, our attempts at humor are viewed as "geeky" and the type of humor that you'd find in the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies.

Every teacher/instructor has a series of standard jokes - here are some of my standards...

- the Visual Assembly joke

- "Yes, you're now realizing that MDX is a tough programming language. And while it looks like T-SQL, that's where the similarities end. You know that old joke about the two guys struggling to change a car tire, and one of them says, 'you know, this isn't exactly rocket science'? Well, somewhere in the world there are rocket scientists saying, 'you know, this stuff isn't exactly MDX".

- "These XMLA commands are the means we have to programmatically update OLAP cubes. This is as good as it gets. (pause). You'd think it could get better, but this is as good as it gets".

- "In the SQL 2008 Change Data Capture log tables, a value of 2 in the __$operation column refers to a logged insert. A value of 1 referes to a logged delete. Values of 3 and 4 refer to an update, for the old value and new value respectively. (pause). Yes, those numbers are correct. Whatever they were drinking when they came up with that sequence, I want some".

- "To build a dashboard in PerformancePoint Services, you need to click here, right-click there, shift-click and drag here, double-click there, click here, drag there....and no, there's no truth to the rumor that PPS users get discounts on carpal-tunnel insurance coverage".

- Be careful about promoting the concept that your reporting techniques will result in fewer printed pages and therefore will kill less trees. I know a guy who made that joke in front of the executives at Georgia Pacific."

- "Dog-food your code", they say??? Developers faced with that pressure don't realize how good they have it. I know a story about a sales meeting at Kal Kan where the president supposedly make his VP of sales eat dog food in front of the sales team.