The following is a brief quip taken from a cousin preceding a group excursion to lunch in rural Tennessee.

On deciding where to go, the driver of the car asked what kind of food everyone wanted. To which my cousin replied:

“I love food. I eat it every day.”

*Some quiet laughter from a few people*

“Sometimes more than once.”

*loud laughter ensues from the entire group*

This joke signifies the familiarity with the ‘Rule of Threes’ in comedy, being that joke structure is often comprised of three stages. Different than a simple punchline joke, where a concluding line of humor is preceded by seemingly non-humorous buildup, this tiered structure makes use of increasingly funny quips that build off of each other to make a whole. While the third tier is similar to a punchline, the buildup consists entirely of humor, rather than a lack of it.

To only do two would be too little an effort (as reflected by the lack of laughs at first), and presumably, four would be an unnecessary excess. Similar to that of Goldilocks, the rule of threes naturally feels ‘just right.’

In this case, it twisted the subject matter of the core necessary activities for human survival: eating, and the standard of having three meals a day. By suggesting this daily necessity as a pleasurable matter of choice, the joker turned the most general of logic into a humorous