What’s so funny about this? If memory serves, I’ve done this joke once before but at least several years ago and most of you probably did not hear or see it. It’s a very clever twist on the use of a comma and several homonyms which proves how devastating incorrect usage can be. Of course, the funniest part is that it’s the panda itself that has misread the encyclopedia entry. You can see that there is no comma in the short sentence that describes what pandas do. It’s only four short words, namely, “eats shoots and leaves”. This punctuation is correct. The sentence tells us that pandas like to eat two parts of young bamboo plants, the stalks and the leaves both of which are soft, supple and green. However, the panda in the joke, the one who walked into the bar, made two serious errors. The first was to mentally place a comma after the word “eats”. The panda didn’t realize that it’s supposed to eat shoots and not hamburgers. “Shoots” is a homonym for the stalk of a young plant AND a verb
