English grammar books tell us that in cases when a defining relative clause is the subject, the relative pronoun can be omitted. This potentially confusing point is best demonstrated by the following song:

“You’re the one that I want” (relative pronoun present)
“You are the one I want” (relative pronoun absent)

Last week, I wrote a posting about misunderstandings that can occur when a word’s part of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc) is misidentified.

It occured to me that ‘parser breakdowns’ don’t just occur at the individual word level. In the following joke, a misunderstanding occurs as a result of a missing relative pronoun.

A man goes into a piano bar and orders a beer and a packet of peanuts. He takes a sip of his beer and is just about to open his peanuts when a monkey snatches them from his hand and runs into the corner to eat them.

The man is a bit unhappy but decides to forget about it. He orders another packet of peanuts and is just about open them when the same thing happens - the monkey snatches them from his hand and runs into the corner to eat them.

The man is now very angry and decides to complain. He shouts to the waitress, “Excuse me. Your monkey keeps stealing my peanuts.”

“It’s not my monkey,” she says. “It belongs to the piano player. Go and tell him.”

The customer goes over to the piano player and says, “Excuse me. Do you know your monkey keeps stealing my peanuts?”

The piano player replies, “No but if you can sing the first few lines, I might recognise it.”