Oh yeah, the punchline had me thinking "Very Asimovian" before I even saw that's what you were going for! It was one that would definitely get people running out of the room screaming on Punday Night.

Yeah, Asimov may not have invented the 'feghoot' but he definitely loved writing them. (The Wikipedia page has some history and mentions both Asimov and Pearls Before Swine.) I suspect the idea of setting up an extended joke like that appealed to his sense of cleverness.

Yeah, I figured out pretty early that this prompt almost demanded a feghoot in response (especially with the word count), it just took a while to come up with something thematically appropriate.

I think I may have missed something. What's the original phrase being feghoot-ed?

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh........

and by the by, I had a cousin who, in the 60's & 70's had an underground rock group called Pearls Before Swine... as I recall, he later became a lawyer...

Vix

That of course is one of the flaws of the format, in that the joke is completely lost if the reader doesn't know the particular phrase. So it's even more language and culture-specific than most puns.

The blogger I mentioned above runs into this sometimes: he loves extended puns like this, and often posts the Pearls Before Swine strips using them; but he's originally from Sri Lanka and the occasional phrase goes right past him because he didn't grow up with idiomatic English.

and there you have it... all the same, it was fun...

Vix