Re last: there is a similar joke in russian, and there is even an expression "a spherical horse in vacuum", «сферический конь в вакууме» in Russian (because physicists modeled their experiment imagining a spherical horse in vacuum). It is so spread that the horse can be replaced with anything, like: "Trump is a spherical jerk in vacuum". Don't be surprised when you encounter something like this in daily speech of a person whose mother tongue is Russian.