The great joke

Have you heard this one? A man goes into a bar where everyone is telling jokes.  'Come on then, tell us a joke,' they say.  Reluctantly he does so, but before he gets to the punch-line everybody shouts him down: they've heard it before, of course.  That's the joke.  Not very funny, is it?

I am that man.  Wherever I go, whatever joke I extract from my meagre repertoire, they have always heard it before. 

I suppose it is some comfort that I am not alone in this damp circle of hell full of jokes which have passed out, on or away.  I know this, because on the rare occasions I begin a joke I have observed that there are two quite different looks in people's eyes.  One is a gaze full of pity and pain from fellow sufferers of jokelessness, decent coves who immediately empathise with me because they too would have told this particular gag, but realise now that it is a dog.  When our eyes meet there is a sad sense of community, of mutual commiseration.  But the other, from the rest of the company in the room, is a look of pure scorn.  It is born perhaps unconsciously from the smug knowledge that they will always have to hand a saucy rib-tickler or a cheeky side-splitter.  They are the inevitable concomitant to us who are jokeless, our nemesis: they are the natural jokers. 

But where do they get them from, these jokes?  Are there books you can buy - or do you first have to be a member of the guild?  Are there evening courses you can attend, hidden away in towns like Dundee?  Do jokers have secret meetings where they hand-craft hundreds of new jokes together, and then apportion them among themselves before letting them loose on the unsuspecting public?  Or do they sneak abroad to gather and translate hilarious tales from Finnish funsters and Macedonian mockers?  Is there perhaps a masonic order of jokers, down whose ranks the latest laughs are reverently passed from the Great Joker in the Sky? 

Until recently I simply had no idea.  All that I knew was that the world seemed irrevocably divided into two classes, like Chesterton's: those that gave and those that received - though in his case he was speaking of dinner parties, not jokes. 

But two chance encounters have given me a clue.  In the course of separate articles in different magazines concerned with different topics, two former prisoners both made a remark along the lines of ‘Of course, it was the jokes which kept us going.’ 

Think about it.  People with time on their hands - they were doing it, after all.  People with little cause to laugh and therefore most need of it.  It was like a good punchline: it seemed apt and inevitable.  If prisons are indeed the true source of jokes, I am reconciled to my own failing in this area.  Because according to this explanation jokes emerge as an attempt at solace for those who need to escape even if only metaphorically in this way.  If it turns out that those who are poor in liberty compensate with a richness of jokes, what right have I to begrudge that liberty of spirit?  That would really be a joke.
 
(27.12.91)

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