The silly thing about this joke in the OP is that day means both “when the sun is up/the opposite of night” and “a period of 24 hours”. English has a lot more words than my native language of Norwegian, but in this case we actually have separate words for the two aforementioned things.
“The day starts at night” sounds silly because it seems to be a contradiction. But really, how else could it be?
Either, day starts at day … but then it was already day. Or, day starts at night … unless we come up with additional entities like dusk or dawn.
And since we haven’t introduced them yet, day has to start at night, as a necessity.
Of course the actual silly thing is that it’s still night right after day has started.
The silly thing about this joke in the OP is that day means both “when the sun is up/the opposite of night” and “a period of 24 hours”. English has a lot more words than my native language of Norwegian, but in this case we actually have separate words for the two aforementioned things.
What are the words?
Døgn vs dag
starts at midnight?