Context
Why this one sticks to Steve Jobs
A joke this compact needs no author to survive. It is a paraprosdokian: the first clause sets a scene, the last four words retroactively demolish it. The mechanism is self-contained, so the line detaches from the stage it was told on and travels alone — and a quote travelling alone will eventually be handed a famous name by someone who assumes it must have had one.
Steve Jobs is a magnet for exactly this. He is one of the internet’s most reliable hosts for orphaned lines: clever, dry, quotable, and dead since 2011, which means nothing new can be checked against him. But the giveaway here is the timeline — the Jobs credit was already being corrected on Apple forums in 2007 ↗, while he was alive and running Apple. The misattribution did not wait for a eulogy. It just needed a joke with no name on it.
A joke that good doesn’t need an author. Which is exactly how it ends up with the wrong one.
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Emo Philips has been on the losing end of this before. Wikipedia notes that a joke of his was voted the funniest religious joke ever in a 2005 online poll ↗ — and that routine, too, circulates widely in unsigned, reworded forms. The tighter the construction, the more portable it is; the more portable it is, the more likely it arrives somewhere wearing someone else’s name.
Note also what the misattribution costs in accuracy. The “Steve Jobs” version reads “laughs” and runs the two sentences together with a dash. Philips used “giggles” and a full stop — a beat, then the reversal. Whoever rewrote it blunted the joke slightly on the way to handing it to a man who never told it.