This classic joke asks: What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?
The answer is: a stick.
A boomerang is known for returning toward the person who throws it. If it does not come back, the joke is that it has lost the one feature that makes it a boomerang.
So instead of being anything special, it is simply a stick.
The humor comes from taking the definition literally. The setup makes you expect a clever name for a broken boomerang, but the punchline strips the object down to what it really is if it fails to return.
