A Good Joke

I like to tell jokes. It feels good to make people laugh, not least of all myself. And while there’s a particular pleasure that comes from telling a joke, or even a righteously bad pun, I consciously came up with on my own, there’s some joy in stumbling upon one out of happenstance as well, or even reading or hearing one somebody else came up with and sharing it with someone else who might find it funny. Such is the essence of popular culture that derives from other, previously successful popular culture—the humor wearing a bit thinner for the reiteration sometimes, or perhaps finding a better context or a better delivery for a good joke to at last achieve its potential. It’s this same sense of joke recycling that has in no small part led to meme culture. See a joke for the first time and it’s funny. See it re-shared the twentieth something time, a month after first reading it and it’s not only a lame joke, but an indictment of the bearer who mistook it for still being new.

In the end, though, a meme is perhaps the lowest form of joke telling. It’s not only following an established recipe for a laugh, but going so far as to not make it yourself at all. It’s opening the jar of spaghetti sauce rather than following your grandmother’s recipe, or perhaps truer still, settling for the can of Chef Boyardee rather than even boiling water for the noodles.

It has been said that there are no new stories and little variation in one story being better than another. The difference is in the telling—the details observed, the choice of where to sprinkle backstory, when to settle into scene and when summary will suffice. I imagine the same might be said of a joke, because though observational humor may evolve with the situations one might observe, the principles of misunderstanding, foolishness, or clever twist of phrase remain.

I’m oversimplifying, I’m sure.

Like so many aspects of my life, I’ve reckoned with seeing anew in these past three years. To parent a child is often a game of trying to see the world through their eyes, to re-understand the fundamentals of what you’ve known long enough to take for granted.

And I remember my son Riley’s first joke—or his first attempt that I recognized as such. He was two and expanding his vocabulary at a rapid pace from nonsense syllables to the repetition of real words that he heard his mother or I say, or that he heard on television. He couldn’t always reconcile a word and its meaning, but did so best with foods—mastering apple sauce, crackers, cookies, and juice relatively early.

One playful evening, my wife tried to teach him to say “Money, please!” in the style of Mona-Lisa and Jean-Ralphio Saperstein from Parks and Recreation. He didn’t get the expression down, but did say, “Crackers, please!” His mother and I howled with laughter.

And so, Riley laughed, too. Maybe he was following our lead, the way he mimicked words and movements. But, then laughter is contagious—who hasn’t gotten the giggles, mostly because someone nearby them giggled, too? More than anything, I like to think that he recognized that something he had consciously done and could very reasonably re-do had made us laugh. His first joke.

And he repeated his joke, crackers, please ad nauseam over the days and weeks and months to follow, and still breaks it out on occasion now, usually when we reminded him of it. Sometimes he waited for us to laugh first, sometimes he didn’t bother, because when you’ve told a truly funny joke, who among us can truly contain ourselves?