30/6/00

Ha, Bloody Ha

Let me state here publicly that I HATE JOKES.

    Did you hear the one about the Arab, the Italian, the Irishman, the Pollack, David Levy and the prostitute?
    Stop me if you've heard it.
    One day there was this comet or something, and the whole world is destroyed and everybody's killed, except for these five men and the whore. And they're on this desert island and they realize that the future of the human race is up to them.
    But it turns out that the prostitute has herpes, VD and AIDS, so the men decide to draw straws to see who will, you know, do it with her for the sake of humanity. But they don't have straws, so they agree that the one with the biggest, uh, you know, will have to be the one. So they take off their pants and it turns out that David Levy wins. The Pollack says -- no, I mean, the Frenchman -- wait a minute, it was the prostitute. The prostitute says, uh, hold on, give me a second. Did I say she's an Arab? Oh, that's right, it was an Italian, Irishman -- anyway, forget the Arab man, the prostitute was Palestinian. So David Levy has to go to bed with this Palestinian, and suddenly there's thunder and lightning and a voice from above says, oh, I forgot to say that this is after all the men pray that their you-know-what is the smallest. So then God says ... let's see, how does it go? It's really funny, I just have to remember the punchline ... something like, oh yeah, I got it: the Pollack prayed that the German would have the biggest you-know-what, and the Italian -- now I'm all mixed up, let me start over. The Italian was an Australian, that's right, and all the men had only 10 minutes to live. OK, so anyways....
    I hate jokes. Everyone thinks because I have this alleged sense of humor, that I'm dying to hear the latest "good one." Well, let me state here publicly that I HATE JOKES.
    For some reason, people get really insulted when I stop them with a polite "sorry, I really don't like jokes." They ask how a guy who writes humor doesn't like a good laugh.
    The answer is: serious humor is not jokes, and jokes don't make me laugh. A quip, a wisecrack, a witticism, a jibe: they make me laugh. Comedy, satire, parody, spoofery, clever wordplay, snappy comebacks: I love 'em! Anything original, off-the-cuff, impromptu, spontaneous -- I'll laugh, I promise.

I BEGAN to realize only a couple of years ago that I hate jokes. Until then, I compliantly stopped whatever I was doing and submissively cooperated when inflicted with yet another "good one." I would smirk or grin or smile or snicker where appropriate, mutter "yeah" or "uh-huh" throughout the telling, because that's what one does, and at the end of a long, pointless burble, when the wit would lean in on me and beam in expectation of an explosive guffaw, I would force myself to say, "Ha ha. Good one." Anything less might have hurt the poor sap's feelings.
    Only when I was far into adulthood did it finally occur to me that I was not really enjoying this yarn-spinning; that I'd developed a dread of these notorious jokesters swooping on me with that anticipatory glint; that I was perceived as a reliable audience for any joke making the rounds; and that no one would ever bother a serious person with long-winded jocundity. And I am a serious person. (But seriously.)
    So I began to let it be known that I hate jokes. My regulars in the circuit were shocked. It was like I said their wives were ugly. They were offended; insulted; hostile; and invariably, undeterred: they had a joke to tell, and I was damn well going to hear it and laugh like hell. Sometimes I have had to repeat, and insist, that I really don't want to hear the latest. Occasionally, even that is not enough.
     I once had a handyman over to my house. I gave him a list of tasks, showed him around and excused myself, explaining that I was immersed in a writing blitz and had to get back to my computer. Sure, he said, but first I had to hear the one about the Irishman and the Jew. I thanked him for his offer, but had to decline. He insisted. More forcefully, I explained that I could not sidetrack my train of thought, and that anyway, I hate jokes. But he apparently had some debilitating joke-telling affliction, and persisted. He guaranteed I'd love this one. We both dug in our heels in a most ludicrous argument. By now incensed, I glared at him and, through clenched teeth, told him to get it over with. He was overjoyed. He started the telling and I cut him off, snarling that I'd already heard it, when I was a kid. Without skipping a beat, he said it doesn't matter, he had a much better one, and launched into the one about the rabbi and the priest.
    You think he was daunted by my icy reaction, by my failure to smirk, grin, smile or snicker? Nope. Before I could push him out the front door, he rammed two more howlers into my brain.
    I have noted several types of bad-joke raconteurs:

* The walkie-talkie, such as that handyman, who has perfected the art of long-winded telling, will hijack anybody anywhere with a "good one" from his vast repertoire, and is never embarrassed by failure.

* The self-defeatist, who struggles with timing, details, delivery and punchline, who knows he's going to blow it but plunges on anyway.

* The boring boor, who'd tell a dead-baby joke, a Holocaust joke, an AIDS joke or a smutty gay joke, without first analyzing his audience.

* The soloist, who giggles and chortles all the way through his own story, and who's rolling on the floor before he can blurt out the punchline. This is actually the best of a bad lot, because he gives you something to laugh at: his laughter.

* The forgetter, who remembers a key detail just before -- or after -- delivering the punchline.

* The forked tongue, who will tell you a lengthy joke in English and then hit you with a Yiddish punchline, and only then ask if you understand Yiddish. (A cousin of the forked tongue will rattle off a joke in Hebrew to a new immigrant and then kindly translate all the words the poor victim didn't understand, and fill in cultural gaps so the listener can comprehend why the punchline was funny.)

    Pooh on 'em all.

GROWING UP in Canada I was raised on Newfy jokes, which were meant to show how  Newfoundlanders are the dumbest people in the world (though frankly, I never met a Newfy I didn't like.)
    Americans tell the exact same jokes to show how the Poles are the dumbest people in the world -- in precisely the same words that the French condescend the Belgians, the British the Irish, the Protestants the Catholics, the whites the blacks and the blacks the whites. It truly is a global community when the Newfies, Pollacks, Irish and David Levy are prone to the exact same foibles.
    I have often wondered who these unfortunates make dumb-dumb jokes about; I mean, if the Polish are the stupidest on Earth, what nationality is even stupider for the Poles to make Pollack jokes about?
    One smarty-pants I work with came at me with the latest old joke. "Did you hear the one about David Levy in the whorehouse?" he said.
    This friend was taken aback when I told him I hate jokes. He objected, pointing out that I'm no minor raconteur myself. I explained that I love a good story, a true story, an anecdote, a vignette, even the apocryphal. Real life is wacky enough, I said.
    I suggested he tell it to the guy sitting next to me, and I'd eavesdrop: if I hadn't heard it before, and if I found it funny, I'd laugh. He shrugged, and went away.
    But he had this great one and he just had to tell it to me.
    Some time later, he picked a quiet moment and rushed over. "Did you hear?" he exclaimed breathlessly. "It was just on the news! They caught David Levy in this whorehouse, and...."
    I let him get it over with, because some jokesters are unstoppable.
    Word has gotten around that I'm a stick-in-the-mud, so folks in my social circles don't come to me with the latest good one. Now they've found a new way in. A co-worker sitting at the next computer was bursting to regale me, and undeterred when I rebuffed him, promptly e-mailed the joke to me. He insisted I read it, so I did. He absolutely swore it was hysterical. It wasn't.
    With e-mail, the problem is out of control: now, it's coming at me from all over the world.
    All I have to do is send or receive a message to someone, and he thinks, aha!, I'll put him on my list of recipients, and send him every stupid joke that everyone else sends me. Then, like some vast, exponentially expanding chain letter, everyone on his list, and everyone on each of their lists, adds me as a recipient, so that by now, if any one person anywhere in the world sends a joke to anyone else, I get it too.
    Of course, it's not just jokes they bombard me with, but all the junk-mail on the loop: cheap puns I outgrew before puberty, urban tales long discredited but naively presented as the God's-honest truth, wordplay that is admittedly clever but which has been making the rounds for decades, and of course petitions, virus warnings that are almost always false, and political propaganda -- which I once even got from a Tupperware lady, for goodness sake! (Do politicians push Tupperware at me?)

    OK, I got a joke for you: did you hear the one about the lightbulb salesman in the Vatican? No? It goes like this...
    I was in Italy a few weeks ago, vacationing with a large group, some of whom we met for the first time just outside the walls of the Vatican.
    So I'm introduced to this American, Bruce.
    Bruce doesn't even say hello.
    "Hey, didja hear the one about the --"
    "STOP!!" I command. "I HATE JOKES." Firmly but politely, I say we could have a fine conversation without telling jokes.
    Bruce is staggered. "But if I can't tell jokes, I got nothing to say!"
    I suggest we try. Bruce and I join the miles-long queue to get into the Vatican, so there's plenty of time, and I'm damned if I'm going to be harangued the whole time with hee-haw. Mike from Minneapolis is with us. (I had met him earlier, at which time he also introduced himself with a joke. He too got my humorless phht.)
    Bruce and Mike, forbidden from telling jokes in my presence, are glum. It seems Bruce is right: they have nothing to say. Brightly, I suggest we talk about real life, "Like, what do you do for a living, Mike?"
    His eyes light up, just as you'd expect from a lightbulb salesman. I got the feeling Mike came all the way to Italy just to make new friends and tell them about lightbulbs.
    So Mike is excitedly telling us fascinating lightbulb stories, lightbulb trivia, lightbulb statistics, lightbulb history. We are learning a lot, and none of it is funny. He explains he's not just any lightbulb salesman, he's a specialist: he's a hospital lightbulb salesman. And Mike is regaling us with incredible facts about which parts of a hospital need what kind of wattage, and this is something everyone needs to know, because for instance an operating room needs lots of watts, but in the corridors where there are people suffering from dementia they need itty-bitty wattage (because glare off a floor confuses them), and I notice that we're still hours away from the entrance to the Vatican...
    So I say, "Mike, do you know any good jokes?"