It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Jones is joking about the way idioms can collide into a kind of surreal logic when taken literally. “Skating on thin ice” suggests taking a risky course; “getting into hot water” suggests landing in trouble. Put together, the phrases create a comic physical impossibility—ice leading to hot water—highlighting how figurative language often works by convention rather than by coherent imagery. The quip also gently satirizes how easily we speak in ready-made metaphors, and how those metaphors can reveal the odd, patchwork nature of everyday English when you pause to examine it.