Lou, you may be a great mechanic but you can’t use a CRANK SHAFT to practice SHANK CRAFT
What’s so funny about this? You’ll notice that the title of this audioboom begins with the words, “What’s the difference between…” The word “difference” signals that we’re using a comparison here of two or more people, things, or concepts. In this case it’s two professions, auto mechanic and butcher. Of course a butcher carves meat while an auto mechanic fixes cars. There are a few similarities. Both require considerable technical training. In the case of mechanics, there was a time when all they needed to know was how the internal combustion engine worked; while this was complicated, nowadays they need to be electronic and computer specialists too. It’s no longer about just changing the oil or doing a tune-up. A butcher’s skills are pretty much what they always have been, cutting up animals into smaller parts to be cooked and eaten by other people. A butcher’s main tools are knives of varying sizes and shapes all designed to cut a specific part of an animal and slice through bone and muscle, kind of like a surgeon. It’s not easy and requires a high degree of skill. An auto mechanic also has a wide array of tools for the various parts of the engine. Both professions require the right tool for the job. Nevertheless in our joke a mechanic seems to think that he can be a butcher too, wondering how different can it be? It seems he wanted to use a crank shaft to help cut off the leg, or shank of a large lamb. In a car, the crank shaft changes the up and down motion of the pistons into the rotary motion of the wheels. Maybe the mechanic was having a hard time slicing through the bone and thought that a chain saw with a crank shaft might be better. We don’t really know. But we know that the butcher tells him his idea isn’t any good because cutting the shank of the animal requires much more skill or finesse than a crankshaft would provide. That’s how we get our spoonerism converting “crank shaft” to “shank craft”. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
