![]() ![]() Something as elusive as the earliest appearance in print of a Uranus joke would seem very difficult to track down, unless the planets all lined up just so. In the absence of documentation, however, that would be mere speculation. Okay then, you say - the tradition started no later than 1851, at least among the English speaking peoples. Uranus as photographed by Voyager 2 in 1986 However, writes Littmann, “The new planet remained officially ‘The Georgian’ in Britain until after the discovery of Neptune and through the 1847 publication of the Nautical Almanac for 1851.” German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, one of the first observers to properly identify the body as the seventh planet from the sun, named it Uranus after the father of Saturn and grandfather of Jupiter in ancient Roman cosmology. According to Mark Littmann in his 2004 tome Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System, that appellation proved “instantly unpopular” wherever the monarch did not reign. But the story of the planet’s nomenclature is more involved, as Herschel didn’t just peer through his telescope and say “I can see Uranus.” The astronomer’s name for the object he discovered (and at first misidentified as a comet) was Georgium Sidus, after King George III. Okay then, you say - the tradition started March 14, 1781. There is no definable difference between good Uranus jokes and bad Uranus jokes - there are only Uranus jokes.Ĭertainly, no planet Uranus joke can predate March 13, 1781, as that was when astronomer Sir William Herschel first discovered the celestial body from the garden of his house in Bath, England. (There is no definable difference between good Uranus jokes and bad Uranus jokes - there are only Uranus jokes.) My own introduction to Uranus jokes must have come close to half a century ago, and certainly the playground comedian who related the jape was working solidly within a received older tradition. ![]() The scatological juvenile obviousness inherent in the myriad variations of these essentially identical gags did not and will never diminish our appreciation of them. Most of us heard, and then gleefully repeated, our first Uranus jokes during childhood. Sorry if the low humor discomfits, but when writing about Uranus jokes, it is the nature of the business. Enterprise and toilet paper alike?Ī: They both hunt for Klingons in the rings around Uranus. JUPITER HELL DISTANCE EXPLANATION PLUSAs an initiation for those unfamiliar with the genre, I offer the ne plus ultra of Uranus humor: Uranus, it has been pointed out, has long been the butt of jokes. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. ![]()
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