How I Met Your Mother: 10 Unforgettable Running Jokes

5. The Naked Man

First appeared in: 'The Naked Man' The Naked Man is the Hail Mary of romantic advances €“ a move so crude that even Barney didn't come up with it before its discovery by the group. Instead, this joke was the product of Mitch, who gave it a try when Robin stepped outside to take a phone call after their blind date. As the name implies, the idea was to strip off while his unsuspecting date was in another room, before relying on the resulting mixture of surprise and pity in order to convince her to sleep with him €“ a technique that Mitch so eloquently referred to as €œshock and awww€. It's absurd, of course. And yet in the skewed world of How I Met Your Mother, it somehow worked €“ two thirds of the time, to be precise. That patchy success rate was later confirmed by failed attempts from Barney, sleazy news anchor Don, and Mitch himself. Bizarre blind dates aside, this technique helped Ted get €œback into the game€ after Stella left him at the altar, seemingly setting him on the path to recovery and even prompting a Dark Knight-esque monologue for his saviour Mitch. It also makes this list by virtue of spawning Lily's equally funny list of €œ50 Reasons to Have Sex€, which includes entries like €œto time an egg€ and €œbecause they have air-conditioning and you don't€.