Context: The informant told this joke in passing, and I asked to hear it again because of the play on words.

Piece:

Informant: “What’s a pirate’s favorite letter?”

Collector: “I don’t know… what is it? Is it R?”

Informant: “Arr you’d think so but me first love be the C”

Background: The informant, a 20 year old college student at Harvard, says is one of his favorite jokes and he tells it often to entertain his friends. He says that he found this joke on Reddit.

Analysis: In order to understand this joke, you have to have the preconceived notion that pirates a stereotypically shown to say “arr.” Therefore, this joke shows how as a society there is a unified understanding of the pirate stereotype and that there can be these jokes on it. This joke catches on because of its spin on the more obvious stereotypical saying by pirates. It demonstrates also how phonetic similarity can function as a joke when recited with another meaning/spelling.