Possibly not a joke but on the topic of 'Awesome things said by Dennis Ritchie''.
Dennis was once asked "In your experience, how long does it take for a novice programmer to become a C programmer capable of writing non-trivial production code?"
Dennis replied, "I don't know. I never had to learn C."
(From the final minute or so of Al Aho from Columbia University at the Dennis Ritchie Tribute at Bell Labs - YouTube )