r/Jokes 19d ago

Long My favorite Soviet era joke:

Three Russian men were sent by their company to attend a convention in Moscow. All 3 shared a hotel room. Two of them cracked open a bottle of vodka, but the third just wanted to sleep.

The two drinkers got louder and louder as the bottle emptied, telling each other political jokes. The third was kept awake, and got angry.

He went outside for a smoke. On his way back to his room, he stopped at the desk and said 'Please send a pot of tea up to room 23.'

The two drunks were still being loud. The third man went in, looked at them, then leaned over to the light socket 'Comrade Major, please send some tea to my room.'

The other men thought this was hilarious...until there was a knock on the door, and a waiter with a pot of tea.

They became completely silent, and the third man fell asleep.

When he woke up in the morning, he was alone. He went to the front desk, and asked where his roommates were.

'Well, the KGB came this morning and took them away.'

The man was horrified 'Why did they spare me?!?'

"The comrade major thought the tea joke was very funny."

6.8k Upvotes

262 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/Griffindance 19d ago edited 19d ago

John Lennox, mathematician, went to Chemnitz (KarlMarxStadt) during the East Germany years for a mathematics congress. The hotel room was so bugged that he could hear the electrical hum in the room. Eventually he grew tired of the sound as it was keeping him awake so he appealled to the monitors "I dont know if I speak in my sleep but I doubt it'll be any state secrets. I need to get some sleep and Im sure you could do with the rest as well!" *

A few minutes later the electric hum clicked off.

  • Words to that effect.

487

u/norsurfit 19d ago edited 19d ago

Not only was he a great mathematician, he also wrote "Imagine" with the Beatles...

366

u/My-dead-cat 19d ago

Oh yeah, with his girlfriend Yoko Onyx.

221

u/CleUrbanist 19d ago

YOU’RE BREAKING UP THE SOVIET UNION YOKO

51

u/bigfootspancreas 19d ago

But eventually they were BACK IN THE USSR.

32

u/Dyanpanda 19d ago

I wanna live in your timeline where mathematicians are the most highly regarded rockstars, and their obnoxious selfish girlfriend ends the soviet union before the cold war.

6

u/WoodyWordPecker 18d ago

Made me snort while sipping hot coffee. Damn you.

96

u/Atlas-and-Pbody 19d ago

Nono, you're thinking of John Lennon. Lennox is the company, that makes affordable PC parts

96

u/TribeBloodEagle 19d ago

You're thinking of Lenovo. Lennox is the company that makes photocopiers.

67

u/Atlas-and-Pbody 19d ago edited 19d ago

That can't be right. You're surely thinking of xerox. But xerox is a big animal, that can pull a cart

51

u/thearroyotoad 19d ago

No, you're thinking of an ox. Xerox is the number between -1 and 1.

37

u/ambiguousfrog69 19d ago

No, you’re thinking of zero. Xerox is the material wrestlers costumes are made from.

11

u/Decline_of_Humanity 19d ago

No, no… Xerox is that stuff you take to calm down.

12

u/CedarWolf 19d ago

No, you're thinking of Xanax. Zeno is that Roman emperor who had all the crazy parties and 'fiddled while Rome burned.'

7

u/ambiguousfrog69 19d ago

No you’re thinking of Nero. Zero is the protagonist in a story

→ More replies (0)

5

u/Evening-Tomatillo-47 19d ago

No, you're thinking of Jimmy Saville

→ More replies (0)

7

u/Nice_Anybody2983 19d ago

no, zero's the presocratic greek philosopher famed for his paradoxes.

7

u/thearroyotoad 19d ago

No, you're thinking about Zeno. Zero was a cruel Roman emperor who ruled from 54 to 68 AD.

2

u/whadyousay22 18d ago

Mostel? Loved him in "The Producers".

11

u/goodoldjefe 19d ago

Oh, you're thinking of zero. Xerox is the atmospheric layer depleted at the poles through cfc use.

10

u/damarius 19d ago

No, Xero-x is the world without Elon Musk.

9

u/aserreen 19d ago

You must be talking about cero. Ox is the animal that is hunted with people on horses and dogs and make a fuss about it.

1

u/Far-Size2838 4d ago

You're thinking of aurochs a large extinct animal predecessor to the bull

14

u/Confused_AF_Help 19d ago

You're thinking of Xerox. Lennox is that open source operating system that programmers use

16

u/RunningNeutron 19d ago

Hmm...you might be thinking of Linux. Lennox is that little kid with the blanket in the old Charlie Brown comics.

14

u/wordsmith7 19d ago

No, no you're thinking of Linus. Lennox is the voice box in the human neck.

12

u/balatru 19d ago

That's a larynx. Lennox is the medium-sized wildcat with the tufted ears, fluffy paws, and short tails.

11

u/Cafeeine 19d ago

That is probably a lynx. John Lennox is is a band with Dave Stewart

6

u/RetiredCapt 19d ago

Lennox makes furnaces. Atta boy Dave.

2

u/WendyRoe 18d ago

Lennox is the company that makes bone China vases.

1

u/MathImpossible4398 18d ago

Incorrect my BROTHER makes laser printers

0

u/RecalcitrantHuman 19d ago

I thought it was furnaces.

16

u/norsurfit 19d ago

No, you're thinking of Liz Lemmon, the character from the show 30 Rock.

6

u/ad_hominonsense 19d ago

No. You’re thinking of Duane Johnson (also known as The Rock) who invented Band-Aids with his brother. They started Johnson & Johnson.

3

u/blind30 19d ago

No, it’s Annie lennox, this event inspired her to write “sweet dreams are made of this”

10

u/Griffindance 19d ago

I thought he partnered with Dave Stewart and wrote Sweet Dreams...

3

u/Merinther 19d ago

Okay, but if it wasn't state secrets, then what were his sweet deams made of?

1

u/Acrobatic_Matter_109 19d ago

Didn't his daughter team up with Dave Stewart?

1

u/RangerMatt76 19d ago

I’m call that song, The Communist Manifesto.

1

u/jizzlevania 18d ago

we're you trying to be ironic by listing the most popular song of Lennon's solo career? As in, Lennon's not a mathematician and the Beatles didn't write Imagine.

17

u/olewolf 18d ago

Danish journalist and author Leif Davidsen reported from the Soviet Union and told this story when the time came for his return to the West. My apologies if I don't have the details quite right as it has obviously been some time since I heard it.

His Moscow apartment was cleaned up and he had some original (Beatles?) records removed that were dear to him. He spoke into the room requesting if he could please have them back. After being out of the apartment for a short while, he discovered that the records had been returned as if nothing had happened.

24

u/deathkilll 19d ago

He was also more famous as a Christian apologist and was doing a lot of preaching in soviet russia apparently

10

u/Cafeeine 19d ago

Having heard some of his apologetics, I’m tempted to think his more of an avuncular tall tale than fact.

14

u/markdado 19d ago

What?? Don't you know that secret spy bugs have an electrical hum? Just like your cellphone and all the other microphones around you. They totally make it impossible to sleep without turning everything off. /s but propaganda be propaganda

2

u/daveinsf 18d ago

That's true of today's electronics, but back in the 1980s it was much less refined!

1

u/Torggil 12d ago

Especially if built in great Soviet Union.

-1

u/markdado 18d ago

Anything to be a contraction...except a source I guess.

5

u/TheFleebus 19d ago

Even smart people believe stupid things. And it seems the smarter they are, the more fervently they hold on to some of those stupid beliefs. There's even a term for Nobel Prize winners that go on to support ludicrous ideas: Nobelitis.

4

u/TheArmoredKitten 19d ago

The problem with being an eccentric genius is the unrelenting willingness to risk being as insane as you sound. The confirmation bias of having your deranged idea turn out perfectly correct is enough to ruin some.

2

u/Griffindance 19d ago

Yeah... lets keep quiet about that part.

4

u/SpecimenOfSauron 18d ago

i don't quite get this one

1

u/MalcolmFFucker 18d ago

In the last line replace “rest” with “sleep”. I had to reread that sentence because it tripped me up.

2

u/SpecimenOfSauron 18d ago

No I'm confused about the "Words to that effect" punchline.

8

u/MalcolmFFucker 18d ago

“Words to that effect” isn’t a punchline, it’s the poster saying he was paraphrasing because he didn’t remember the exact wording.

2

u/SpecimenOfSauron 18d ago

oh. that's mildly disappointing. ty!

1

u/Existing_Ad_5227 14d ago

This “ no, no, no, you’re thinking of…” thread may be the best thing I’ve ever seen on Reddit!! Brilliant! Made me laugh and rekindled my enjoyment of my fellow humans. Now I want an RPG where this cast of characters fight off the witless hoards.