Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The banana in my ear genre of humor represents a prototypically American form of irony and chagrin, expressing both amusement and frustration with Catch-22 situations. The genre gets its name from the following joke, an exchange between two people: "Hey, you've got a banana in your ear!" "What?" "I said, YOU'VE GOT A BANANA IN YOUR EAR!" "What? I can't hear you; I've got a banana in my ear!" The preposterous situation in which a person complains of being unable to hear helpful advice, because the advice he's not taking prevents him from hearing it, has far-reaching implications in the fields of law, engineering and philosophy. See: self-referential humor artificial intelligence This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.