2014-03-13
Explanation
The Joke
A man prays to God asking how he will die. God tells him it will be "unexpected." The man is grateful and relieved. Later, the man suffers a heart attack and, while dying, protests that heart attacks are the most common way to die and that he did not even expect this particular death. He then realizes that is exactly the point -- God said it would be unexpected, and a heart attack was so common and mundane that he never saw it coming. God laughs hysterically from heaven.
The Humor
The joke plays on the double meaning of "unexpected." The man interprets God saying his death will be "unexpected" as meaning it will be something rare, exotic, or dramatic -- something out of the ordinary. He is comforted by this, presumably imagining he will live a long, normal life before some bizarre end. The irony is that God meant "unexpected" literally: the man will not expect it when it happens. A heart attack -- the most statistically common cause of death -- is the ultimate unexpected death precisely because its commonality makes it easy to dismiss. God finds this hilarious, revealing a trickster quality: He gave a technically truthful answer that He knew would be misinterpreted. The comic explores how humans project meaning onto ambiguous statements, especially from authority figures.