this post is a play on the 1981 hit single 867-5309/Jenny written by Tommy Tutone. The song is about a guy finding “Jenny“‘s number written on a wall and is his plea to her to not change it in hopes that he will have the confidence to call her some day [2]. my post is a parody of the original as instead of the speaker finding a phone number on the wall, he finds a public key. public keys are used for asymmetric encryption and are used by a person to give others the means to communicate with them in a secure means without having to first agree on a shared secret [3]. using this public key, “pubkey”, the speaker in question could potentially send encrypted messages to Jenny, so long as she doesn’t change pubkeys. now here is where the joke comes in: in the original song the chorus consists of singing the digits of her number, so the comedic element of my post is brought to light after considering how long it would take to sing out a single line of the chorus, because public keys are very long in order to preserve cryptographic integrity [4]. This is funny because the reader has to resort to reading out each symbol individually without emotion, which has many parallels with why TTS also seems funny when it reads out long strings [5]. there exists of fallacy with my joke however, that being that although the speaker has Jenny’s pubkey, the speaker doesn’t necessarily have any way to send his encrypted messages to her, which contrasts the original as knowing a person’s phone number is adequate enough to contact them. the reader will have to ignore this inconsistency however to fully appreciate the joke, but in a way knowing this also adds another layer of irony to this post [6].

i hope you are now able to appreciate this joke, as i hope everyone gets the chance to [7].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WTdTwcmxyo
[2] https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/867-5309/
[3] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/how-does-public-key-encryption-work/
[4] https://www.jscape.com/blog/should-i-start-using-4096-bit-rsa-keys
[5] https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=954548
[6] https://www.scribbr.com/rhetoric/irony
[7] https://wasteof.money/posts/6909207ada9bad4ebbd66bb2#comments-690920b6da9bad4ebbd66bb3

chiroyce:

i liked this explanation more than the joke XD thanks! i knew it had something to do with how the pub key changes so they cant communicate but didnt know the reference to the song

11/8/2025, 4:40:29 AM