Education

The Barman and the Hair Joke A man walks into a bar and asks for a beer. The Barman on giving the beer to the man says “I’ll bet you £50 that you can’t hold onto a mug in one hand and a hair in the other until one minute past midnight, blindfolded”. The man, seeing that there is only twenty minutes to go, nods and agrees to the wager. The Barman puts a mug into one of the man’s hands and a long hair into his other ensuring that the man has seen him do this before blindfolding him. “Now then” says the Barman “I am going to try to pull the mug from your hand” he warned “notice how I pull on the mug and your arm follows before you pull back in a to me, to you motion”. After pausing to allow the man to reflect the Barman says, “Now I will try to pull the hair from your other hand” again giving the man ample warning “ and viola, it’s gone, you can now take off the blindfold”. “I will not”, said the man, slightly perplexed. “I can still feel the hair in my hand. This is clearly part off the trick so I shall wait until it is time to do so”. At a minute passed twelve the man had the blindfold taken off of him to find that in one hand the mug was still there but that the hair had gone. “You see”, said the Barman “you held both the hair and the mug but you only really had a grip on the mug not the hair.” The man gazed and replied “but I could feel the hair still in my hand after you pulled it”. The Barman frowned “the sensation of the hair leaving your hand made you think that it was still there when it wasn’t, in fact, you had grasped the mug because it was made to be grasped, it is of enough substance the hair is not of enough substance so you had no grip – you could not grasp it, it is not made to be grasped”. The Barman walking back to the bar raised his voice for all to hear “this was a classic case of //hair today, gone tomorrow//”.