It was nothing to do with Windows, it's a sorta joke where the person telling the joke is trying to use logic to compare 2 different things, with humorous results.

A better example is an old Norm Mcdonald (I think) joke, I'll post it below.

A guy sees his new neighbor out in his backyard, so he decides to get acquainted. After introductions, he asks the new neighbor what he does for a living.

The new neighbor says, "I'm a professor." The first neighbor then asks, "Oh yeah, what do you teach?"

"Logic," the professor reponds.

"What is that?" the neighbor inquires.

"Well, let me see if I can give you an example...you have a dog, right?"

"Yeah, that's right," neighbor #1 responds.

"And you have children too, right?" says the professor.

"Wow, right again!" exclaims the neighbor.

"So, then you must be married and that would make you a heterosexual, right?'' proclaims the professor.

"Unbelievable, you're absolutely correct. How do you know all this about me?"

"Well," the professor says, "I observed there was a dog house in your backyard, so you must have a dog. I also saw bicycles next to your garage, so you must have children. And if you have children, you are probably married and if your married, you are most likely heterosexual... it was all logical!"

The next afternoon, the neighbor runs into his old friend. His friend asks if he has met the new neighbor. The man says that he met him yesterday.

"What's he like?"

"Well," the man says, "he's nice and he is a professor of logic."

"Oh," says the friend, "what's logic?"

"Maybe I can give you an example. Do you have a dog house?"

"Why, no, I do not," responds the friend.

"Well, then," proclaims the man, "that means you're gay!"

I would argue that:

1. This is not actually a joke in the strict sense of the word. There is no punchline. The humor is entirely in the context.

2. Your friend does not understand any of this and is just repeating the "joke" because other people laughed about it at some point. It has nothing to do with the Windows operating system, so if that was part of his explanation he is probably just making shit up to cover his own ignorance.

This reminds me of a similar joke:

Sharks can swim faster than humans. But humans can run faster than sharks. So in a triathlon, it all comes down to who can bike the fastest

https://knowyourmeme.com/...

I guess the joke is that someone is using logic and reasoning to figure out what propels a car as though it was some great mystery that needed to be analyzed and thought about. I don't think it's very funny and it could have also been your friend's delivery.

Reminds me of this one :

"Honey, close the window, it's raining outside."

...

"Love, I did close the window, but it's still raining outside."

This might not be what your friend is going for, but I smirked slightly and this is how I interpret it:

I particularly like jokes that take something absurd and launder it through the structure of things that do make sense. Everything in your friend's joke is factually true. It's structured as a logically consistent argument.

And yet it is completely nonsensical. No one has ever thought that windows make something move. It invoked a slightly confused response in me, which is why I found it funny.

It's not a great joke, but I might tell it to feel out someone's sense of humor plus whether they pick up on that I'm doing so. I think the analogy to Windows makes it a weaker joke, but I would give that as an explanation just to mess with someone a little.

I've heard this before, but more in the context of a proverb than a proper joke. As far as meaning, I think it's along the lines of "correlation doesn't equal causation," but not exactly.

The closest example of similar humor I can think of is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, during the trial of trying to figure out if the woman is a witch. The scientist is there to settle it for the peons, and uses "logic" to solve the problem of whether she is a witch. Ultimately they decide that if she weighs the same as a duck, she must be made of wood, which floats on water, and therefore a witch. It's a series of nonsensical correlations misconstrued as fact, and it's funny because we the viewers understand the absurdity of it.

I think it's more a bit of wordplay than a joke exactly, but that your friend said is in the same vein. What on earth makes cars go? Well it can't be windows, can it? Houses have windows and they don't go at all! Whether you find that funny is obviously subjective but I also think delivery and conversational context are very important for humor like this.

The humor comes from the unexpected final line. It's what's sometimes called an anti-joke, where instead of a punchline the final line is so banal as to be ridiculous, and that unexpected banality is the source of the humor.

I am so confused right now. I don't see the joke written down anywhere. The post just links to an AI generated looking image of a woman in a red dress sitting on a red car in front of a building. Is that the joke itself?

I'd say the joke is probably that you are logically deducting something thats already obvious to everyone, portraying logicians as people that are far removed from reality

All I get is that if two things have the same feature and one moves but the other doesn't, then what causes the movement isn't that feature.

Here I guess it means Windows isn't the reason anything moves forward, aka progress, but if there is more meaning to it I'm not getting it

Reminds me of the Seinfeld New Yorker comic episode

I can't recall correctly but I think there was a similar one with alcohol. Someone that used to mix alcohol with other drinks. In the end he always ended up drunk so he decided to stop mixing it.

Does he by any chance use Linux? 😂 Sounds like a Linux joke about Windows.

Something has to be the reason the car can move, and it can't be the windows because houses have windows and they don't move.