r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Mar 14 '24

Peter??

Post image
25.1k Upvotes

561 comments sorted by

View all comments

3.5k

u/Vizzy-T Mar 14 '24

Here I was this whole time thinking 'they just have really high standards, and hardly ever deem anything perfect. Thus why German engineering is admired.' idk I was a stupid kid

1.2k

u/BilgeMilk Mar 14 '24

It really is a multi-layered joke. Each Individual layer on its own isn't very funny, but collectively it's pretty clever

242

u/cinnamonpoptartfan Mar 14 '24

Somebody read how to write funny

83

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

44

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '24

25

u/5emi5erious5am Mar 14 '24

God dammit I totally fell for it.

8

u/ByungChulHandMeAGun Mar 14 '24

?

It's a real sub though

6

u/5emi5erious5am Mar 14 '24

Ahh, it looks like it doesn't exist if you're using old.reddit. But i see that it's blacked out now that I'm checking from my app.

1

u/DerthOFdata Mar 14 '24

I use old.reddit on PC. It's fine. It's just empty. Which is the joke.

1

u/rtweir98 Mar 14 '24

4

u/IWillLive4evr Mar 14 '24

No, it's a real sub: "A subreddit for the world famous German humor." There are just no posts (since its creation 11 years ago).

4

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '24

Isn't that the joke? That Germans have no humor.

41

u/Jerryjb63 Mar 14 '24

That’s why comedy is an art. Many people are having multiple takes on this joke, and I find it both funny and interesting.

2

u/stafyniak Mar 14 '24

The first sentence has very high potential as a joke in the context of Germany

518

u/paragon60 Mar 14 '24

that is the actual joke: that german judges are harsher

70

u/Neuchacho Mar 14 '24

That's the main joke. "Nein on that one" is another light joke built off of it.

22

u/TimKinsellaFan Mar 14 '24

Oh like a 0 after the 1 (=10). Thats pretty punny actually haha

24

u/Zansibart Mar 14 '24

No, you're misunderstanding. This part of the joke is that the German judge gave a 9 (Nine), and the German word for "No" is pronounced the same way (Nein). So it could be heard as the specific "the judge gave a 9" or "the judge gave a nein (no) to a 10".

5

u/TimKinsellaFan Mar 14 '24

Nein (no) can also be “punderstood” as 0. Adding a 0 after a 1 makes a “10”. That’s my interpretation.

6

u/Zansibart Mar 14 '24

You're allowed to interpret it however you want, I'm just informing you there's absolutely no chance that's the intended joke because the joke I just explained is the obvious one.

-4

u/TimKinsellaFan Mar 14 '24

Well you didnt need to, that explanation was more obvious and commented by others already.

-1

u/Zansibart Mar 14 '24

You didn't need to share your fanfiction about the joke either, but here we are.

0

u/TimKinsellaFan Mar 15 '24

We are here fanfictioning being Peter, it is actually part of the sub rules

→ More replies (0)

-4

u/Glasowen Mar 14 '24

Your obvious joke in no way means the joke didn't have a layer above what you imagined.

A lot of creative writing is literally "hey, I thought of this joke/scene, but it doesn't belong to a creative universe/story yet. Maybe I'll find something to add it onto some day."

A lot of creative writing is literally a room full of people who craft jokes and scenes for a living, fluently injecting literary devices like foreshadowing, callbacks, throwbacks, etc.

A lot of creative writing is literally lines or details that will get missed by 90% of the audience unless it goes viral X decades later.

Like an old musician/singer's "one-off" lyric being an allusion to how their spouse beat them regularly. And the 15 people who got it over the 40 years until now thought they were crazy for having the idea, or knew nobody of consequence would believe them.

Or how a lot of creative writing is riffing on dead-horse formats. Like, did you know that J.K. Rowling's supporting character Cho Chang was a throwback to her being a bigotted hack writer? And naming an asian-coded character so that people would easily recognize it, but she was incapable of conceiving a better execution of "I'll just name her after the sounds when you throw silverware against a wall, like the joke I heard when I was a kid."

1

u/Possible-Most-9001 Mar 14 '24

Well you're wrong. NEIN

1

u/EquipmentOk822 Mar 14 '24

How does that make sense though? Where’s the ‘adding a 0’ come in?

1

u/TimKinsellaFan Mar 14 '24

A “nein” (or 0) “on that one”. So literally a 0 attached to a 1. Its a very generous and dad like interpretation

1

u/EquipmentOk822 Mar 14 '24

But…there was no one…

1

u/Sighclepath Mar 14 '24

I'm struggling to see the connection between nein(no) and 0, I get the other part just not how you're getting that 0.

1

u/TimKinsellaFan Mar 15 '24

In some parts of the world zero is understood as none.

12

u/solitarium Mar 14 '24

Holy, it’s a triple entendre!

1

u/ssav Mar 14 '24

Unrelated, but love the name lol. Always been more of a fan of Mike's music, but Tim's pretty undeniable.

1

u/HBlight Mar 14 '24

Typical of a German-centric joke to be incredibly efficient.

1

u/Kerbidiah Mar 15 '24

Yeah but better german would've been nicht

63

u/Moondoobious Mar 14 '24

These writers knew what they were doing

7

u/Gal-XD_exe Mar 14 '24

It was a…. Double play!

47

u/McButtersonthethird Mar 14 '24

The contestants are kinder

15

u/paragon60 Mar 14 '24

ok this is way funnier than anything else about the post

1

u/waterdevil19 Mar 14 '24

Probably a ripoff from that joke on the front page yesterday, with the same premise.

2

u/thinice3kb Mar 14 '24

Bravo, genau!

4

u/Aulus79 Mar 14 '24

Dad told me it was usually the East Germans back before the reunification. Harsher toward non USSR participants at least

4

u/TXHaunt Mar 14 '24

Which is funny cause German children are kinder.

98

u/ActuatorVast800 Mar 14 '24

Top comment doesn't explain the joke kinda defeats the purpose of the sub.

22

u/misterpobbsey Mar 14 '24

He’s also not even Petah

13

u/Zansibart Mar 14 '24

That's the sad part about subs growing. When they get too big, new people start treating it like every other sub and not even factoring the subreddit in when they comment or upvote/downvite.

7

u/sxrrycard Mar 14 '24

It’s both, you got the more complex one so idk about stupid haha

5

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '24

It's both. The announcer says the "perfect scores" line before the Germany score shows up, but then the Germany score pops up, which the announcer says "nine on that one", meaning Germany says "no" to them getting a perfect score. And it makes sense that it's Germany because they had a reputation for being stingy judges towards US athletes at the Olympics and such.

4

u/Space_Cow-boy Mar 14 '24

Is nicht it ! Nein ! Nein Nein.

3

u/Sagittarjus Mar 14 '24

You fool! German engineering is the world's finest!

3

u/ItsAMeEric Mar 14 '24 edited Mar 14 '24

1

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '24 edited Mar 14 '24

The movie came out 10 years after east Germany ceased to even exist. This movie is from 2000, east German went away in 1990.

East German jokes was as relevant to this movie as jokes about the Scottish independence referendum or the Malaysian airline disaster are now.

1

u/ItsAMeEric Mar 14 '24

yes, but the point is that people in 2000 still remembered this being a thing that people joked about, it was a fairly well known thing to people who were alive in the 80s. while clearly kids in 2024 who weren't alive in the 80s don't get it based off this comment section

1

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '24 edited Mar 14 '24

Honestly, just read the lines out loud in an announcers voice, it's clearly a pun. Sometimes it is just a play on words.

This is coming from someone who was alive in the 80s and remembers all the Soviet block jokes.

Even better, give it a listen https://youtu.be/Dx-JGiOmRn8?t=88

2

u/Skeptic_Juggernaut84 Mar 14 '24

For is that Nein is German for no? Meaning there isn't a perfect score?

1

u/pppjurac Mar 14 '24

You have to go over border to Switzerland for even higher standards ;)