I was in a bar the other night, hopping from barstool to barstool, trying to get lucky. But there wasn't any gum under any of them.

A typical Emo Philips one-liner built on misdirection: the setup suggests a familiar barroom narrative about “getting lucky” (sexual or romantic success), but the punchline literalizes “lucky” as finding a piece of gum stuck under a barstool. The joke plays on the gap between adult desire and childish scavenging, undercutting the narrator’s swagger with a petty, almost pathetic objective. It also satirizes the bar as a place of low expectations—where even the most trivial “score” is hard to come by. The humor depends on Philips’s persona: earnest delivery, odd logic, and a willingness to make himself the butt of the joke.