A funny joke

Peter made a joke today. I had never heard a joke with that kind of structure so found it real funny.

For some time, Peter has been trying to get me to buy his old Toyota Carolla. We are on a walk when we notice a shiny new Tesla driving by.

Emile: That's a fine looking piece o' machinery, wouldn't ya say? I actually find the white coat of paint to be quite attractive.
Peter: Nah nah, trust me. You don't want a white Tesla, you want a silver Corola.

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An excerpt from a relevant article in The Atlantic that I quite enjoyed:

Everything is formed by habit. The crow’s feet that come from squinting or laughter, the crease in a treasured and oft-opened letter, the ruts worn in a path frequently traveled—all are created by repeatedly performing the same action.

Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.

Anything that’s habitually encountered—the landscape of a daily commute, storefronts passed on a walk to the bus stop, photographs arranged on a mantelpiece—tends toward invisibility. The more we see a thing, the less we see it. Familiarity breeds neglect.

Once perception settles into a comfortable pattern, we fall asleep to it. Only when the pattern is broken do we notice there is a pattern at all. The chains of mental habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.

Wit, whether visual or verbal, can make the commonplace uncommon again by breaking the habits that render perception routine. We tend to define the quality of wit as merely being deft with a clever comeback. But true wit is richer, cannier, more riddling. And the best of it is often based on a biological phenomenon called supernormal stimuli.