Good Joke

    I'm still not sure why—maybe it was the timing in my life, or that bizarre room I was in—but that story was able to momentarily, and completely, suck me out of my bed and spit me out right in the middle of that quiet field, under that clear night sky, surrounded by that warm breeze. I could practically hear the heads of wheat rustling, could practically smell the clean dew and fertile earth. But now, like some sort of psychological balancing act, every time I start talking about Doug and his early morning epiphany, I’m instantly teleported back, not to that prehistoric field, but to that strange bedroom with the trembling window and that awful mothball smell, to that night when someone was kind enough to tell me about the first joke ever told in hopes that it would bring me enough peace to put me to sleep. Of course, it only made my insomnia ten-times worse, but because of it, when the candle wick finally fizzled out a couple hours later, I had the peace-of-mind to let it stay that way.

    You know my absolute most favorite thing about that version of the story? Every other one I’ve heard assumes that the Almighty Doug is way too important to be mortal, that he survives well on into eternity and beyond, or, at the very least, that he died a hero’s death, atop the back of a Dragon or melting in a volcano or shooting off into space where he exploded and became a constellation in the shape of a thumb’s up. But this one? Nah. A blood vessel popped in his brain, probably while he was wearing the Caveman-version of a diaper. Epic.

    And I’m not just being ironic and couth when I say how great that is. Even though it is kind of funny (but why? what does that word even mean? here we go again...), it really is pretty great too, once you think about it. He died by himself, he died uncertain of who he was or where he was going or why, he died unpredictably, and he died a failure, same as the rest of us will. And—and!—he was supposedly one of the greatest beings of all time. Didn’t change a thing. So much potential, so much awesomeness...just gone, pointless...pointless potential…

    I also love that story because I'm a sucker for a good joke. Jokes are like these compact, juicy morsels of storytelling—the cupcakes of literature. They have a beginning, a middle (if necessary), an end, and an exciting climax. No cliffhangers, no needless subplots, no flowery prose, no drawn-out love triangles. A joke is an important idea conveyed through narration, an idea that’s satisfying, eye-opening, and joyful—the best closure you’ll ever taste.

    Here’s one of my faves:

So a Priest, a Rabbi, a Lawyer, a Chicken, a Clown, a Polack, a Blonde, Hitler, Hellen Keller, a dead baby, and Yo Mama walk into a bar. The Bartender says: “What is this? Some kind of a joke?”

    Beautiful, says I. Two sentences. It’s got a setting, a plot, a whole host of interesting characters, a theme, a point, and one gem of a conclusion. Not a single word is wasted. I love it. Suck books.

    But, aside from the entertainment value of jokes, I think there’s something much deeper to them, something much more important going on. It’s why it makes me nervous whenever I sense a threat to a joke, whenever I hear phrases like: “That’s not funny,” or “You shouldn’t be laughing at that.” I get protective. My maternal hackles rise. Sometimes I get carried away. ’Cause who are you to decree what strikes me as funny, you know? That’s like telling me I'm only allowed to enjoy certain flavors of cupcakes, that if my tastebuds prefer pineapple over strawberry, that it somehow means that I’ve deliberately chosen an incorrect option. Well, how about you go suck yourself. And you know what, for the record, strawberry cupcakes taste like lipstick, so suck you and your stupid tastebuds...sorry.

    There’s more to it than that, even. Because, unlike cupcakes, jokes mean something to some of us. I know a couple people who claim that their lives were saved by jokes. People who feel that a world without jokes is a world not worth living in. People who might not've gotten over personal tragedies or failures had there not been a few jokes along the way to get them back on their feet. People who would have been completely lost without jokes to light up their path. For some of us, humor is the only thing that makes any kind of sense. It’s our religion, our life, our candle on the nightstand, and we don’t take lightly to those who want to blow it out.

    But I know why some want to. Some of us have been burned by that light, and burned badly. Even though when most of us think about laughter and humor, our first associations are feelings of—what?—joy and peace, right? As if humor was exclusively married to those emotions. And yet how often do you see cruelty without humor? Bullying without laughing? Hilarity without sickness? As much as we might want to only focus on the good parts of humor, like proud old ladies boasting about our handsome grandsons, we have to admit that humor has a long and troubling record of hanging out with a bad crowd.

    And maybe that’s another reason why my stomach turns when I hear the dreaded That’s not funny! Because maybe it’s really not funny. Maybe if more people stood up against wiseguys, there would be less bullying, less meanness, less emotional violence in the world. It’s wholly possible that one day we could all collectively decide that nothing is funny anymore, nor should it be. That humor is at best pointless and at worst dangerous, that nothing should be laughed at because we will have, as a species, evolved into beings that are too serious to tolerate things that are funny, that jokes do more harm than good. Really, when you think about it, should cupcakes even be on the food pyramid at all? Maybe...but—and I don’t know about you—but for me, a universe without cupcakes is a dark place indeed. And the same is true of jokes. I truly believe that the day we kill the joke, we’ll be burying our humanity with it.

    I know what you’re thinking: Gee, I like a good knock-knock joke just as much as the next gal, but c’mon! The end of HUMANITY? Really? No, REALLY? Dramatic much?

    Fair point. I am guilty of my fair share of hyperbole. But, in this one instance at least, it doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about. I think the only reason you doubt me is because you don’t know jokes in the same way that I know them. You’re only thinking about them in one dimension, as a receiver of jokes, not as a transmitter of them. Once you start to see jokes from all angles, you start to notice that every gag and prank and pun and sketch ever created is, essentially, a beautiful game of empathy, where, when done correctly, all players win. If one side loses, so does the other. Let me explain.

    Every joke you’ve ever heard is an attempt by someone to make a deep, personal connection with another. The joke-teller is trying to lure others into her own head, and the audience is constantly trying to get in there. Where is she going with this? What’s the punchline going to be? Why did she say that when she should have said--OOOoooooh, wait! I get it now! I WASN'T on the same page as her, but now I AM! Haha!

    See? A joke is a puzzle where the solution is always understanding what another is getting at, a game we play to help us comprehend the intent of those around us.

    Tell me—what’s sarcasm? It’s saying the opposite of how you feel in hopes that the listener will try to know you well enough to understand your true feelings on the matter.

    What’s a pun (other than stupid)? A meaningless linking of two ideas—a connection that is so lame and pointless, that the only reason someone would even suggest it is in hopes that an audience will note the connection and—for a quick, painful second—be on the same, low-frequency wavelength of the pun-teller.

    Why are jokes often vulgar? Because every adult has knowledge of things that are dirty, but they aren’t always allowed to talk about such things. Even though your boss and your Waiter and your Priest and your grandparents are all deeply familiar with the existence of cursing and violence and boobies, you’re also not going to bring up those things at the dinner table or the board meeting or Sunday school—even though they know that you know that they know about them, and even though you know that they know that you know about them, those topics mostly go unsaid and unshared. That particular connection is never made. Except in jokes.

    That’s why when I see someone stand up in the audience and go: You shouldn't be joking about that! I have a second cousin who’s deaf!, in my head I go: Welp, another one just lost the game. Folded before the cards were even dealt. Because obviously the joker doesn’t actually mean that all deaf people deserve to get run over by trains, but if you can’t see that, then you’ve obviously made zero attempt to understand where the joker was actually coming from; you missed that connection completely. Unless, of course, you actually do take the time to understand the joke-teller, and it turns out that she actually does mean that the eradication of deaf people is the next natural step in our evolution, then, well...I guess that’s not funny.

    Because the same rules of the game apply to the joker; empathy is, after all, a two-way street. Take the old practice of mimeface. Remember that one? It’s something Actors used to do because they thought it was funny. Instead of allowing Mimes to participate in plays about Mimes, the Actors themselves would just wear makeup and striped shirts and act how they figured Mimes would act. It was funny, but only to other Actors. Because a connection was made between them—they all had the same assumptions about an entire race of foreign people, and it felt good to share in that—but once that joke became stale (since that connection had already been made, over and over and over again), they tried using it outside the realm of Actors, and they got absolutely demolished by their audience. Why did the joke fail that time? Because the joker lost the game of empathy—no longer could she get away with refusing to understand people unlike herself, no longer could she hide behind the excuse of funny.

    Some of you might already be picking up on a hitch in this hypothesis: people make empathetic connections all the time, but not all of those connections are funny, like stories that are “touching”, or lovers that are also...touching. And, really, isn’t that what all art is, when you boil it down? An attempt at making a connection? “Art is how to speak when words fail,” after all.

    Well, a joke isn’t just the forming of a personal connection—it’s the forming of a very specific connection with a very specific message, a message that we can only catch in flashes and glimpses and brief bursts of laughter. Because even though all jokes are humorous, not all humor is jokes. Really, a joke is just a vessel for humor, a means to an end.

    Which begs the question, once again: what is humor? What is it that jokes are trying to tell us? What the hell is so funny? Well, to answer that, we must first answer another, more simple question: what is the meaning of life? So, real quick, let’s go ahead and knock that one out, and then we can finish up with the hard stuff after that.