Stupid Buddhist Joke of the Week

Every week I go to Friends of the Heart for a fix of mindfulness meditation, and half way through we break for some conversation. This week, Gwen, the woman who leads the sits, was commenting on the fact that we in the west have inherited the rationalist mind/body dualism whereas Buddhism treats mind and body as integrated. Then she told a joke:

René Descartes was on the red-eye from Paris to New York. A flight attendant approached and asked if he was comfortable. “Oui,” he replied. “Can I get you a drink?” she asked. He looked at her and said: “I think not.” And he disappeared.

A gentleman sitting across from me told Gwen he didn’t think it was a very good joke because everybody knows that Descartes died long before the invention of flight. I spoke up in her defense and suggested that the joke was entirely plausible because, at the time, Descartes existed on another plane.