Sveinbjorn Thordarson

Academic jokes, though, typically don't travel very well. ... The one exception - and here I know I am taking a risk - may have been the late Columbia University professor of philosophy Sidney Morgenbesser.

A distinguished visiting speaker offered the view that "in some natural languages, a double negative is a positive, and in others it is a negative; but in no natural language is a double positive a negative".

"Yeah, yeah," responded Morgenbesser from the back.

-- The Guardian, Jonathan Wolff on the academic's sense of humour