There's an old joke (it actually comes down to us from an ancient Roman joke book) that goes like this:
An absentminded professor and a bald man and a barber were making a journey together and camping out in a lonely place. They arranged for each of them to stay awake in turn for four hours and guard the luggage. When it fell to the barber to keep watch first, wanting to pass the time he shaved the head of the prof and, when his shift was done, woke him up. The prof rubbed his head as he came to and found himself hairless. “What a right idiot the barber is,” he said. “He’s gone all wrong and woken up the bald man instead of me.”
The phrase "absent-minded professor" is something of a loose translation here. We are primed to accept that as a term for an intellectual who does something amusingly stupid. But the phrase "an academic" would be a more neutral translation of the underlying Latin, I'm told.
What is fascinating about this joke is the structure, "Three guys very different from each other go on a camping trip." Much like "three mismatched guys walk into a bar" or "three mismatched guys die in a bus accident and go to the Pearly Gates together." Comedians continue to use that structure.
The more things change....
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