Read My Joke ... please!

So, a monkey wearing a red hat walks into this bar and says…

A pal of mine recently wondered aloud, “Why do we write?”

I’m always mesmerized by such simple little questions. Those innocent bits of inquisition will send me wandering around in a daze for days.

In time, I think, I’ve come to believe that I write only to amuse myself. It’s an incredibly selfish pastime. Perhaps this is a self-defeating method for any amateur but it always seems to me that the practice of amusing others is not so much fun.

The honorable editors of the GH, of course, are not amused or pleased with the last few submissions. In fact, they are convinced that the author should be more focused on amusing our audience.

Our mission is to amuse not inform, they said.

Well, that would be fine, replied the cynical author, except for that fact that nobody reads anything anymore anyway. If you want, I’ll break the more tedious parts into bite sized chunks for easier digestion but, believe me, there’s nobody out there to amuse.

So, what’s the dea-uhl with all these French people, huh?

In a beautifully concise article published in the International Herald Tribune on 2/14/07, Stacy Schiff, author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America", wrote about a completely different book titled “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” written by Professor Pierre Bayard.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/14/opinion/edschiff.php

Ms. Schiff delightfully points out that even though she is convinced we will not read the good Professor’s mysteriously titled book, not the least of reasons being it is written only in French, the exquisite double-irony is that we may still talk about it!

Mon Dieux! I tell ya, man, I like that a lot.

Hey, I tried to learn French once. I spent a whole month watching TV5 and even took short phrase-book lessons from a French-Moroccan barmaid for a while. (Until one day she forced me to eat boiled sea urchin, which is another story altogether …) I like the fact that the language is mumbled a lot but in the end found too many unvoiced syllables even for my taste. Besides, with vast experience on my side, I can order a beer, ask directions to the restroom, and say thank you in a half-dozen languages already.

When you think about it, what else does one really need to say?

But the primary reason we won’t read the good Professor’s book, according to Ms. Schiff, is that we do not read anything anymore anyway. With the advent of the internet, we have devolved into beings who replaced reading meandering context with searching for condensed content a long time ago.

She’s right and I know if any suntanned surfer read this far they probably didn’t click the link to her article so let me force upon you this critical little bit of what she wrote:

“Say what you will about Bayard, he forces us to confront a paradox of our age. By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in the midst of a full- blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d'oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic. Small wonder that trivia is enjoying a renaissance. We are very good on questions like why men fall asleep after sex and why penguins' feet don't freeze.”

That’s a stab in the heart, ain’t it? I showed this excerpt to the honorable editors and they were just aghast, all screaming out loud, Oh, Lord, what have we done? Graphomania epidemic! Really? Yeah, I told ‘em, she nailed that description of “anorectic” attention spans, too.

So what did the farmer say when he lost his tractor?

It’s really a good thing that nobody’s paying attention or bothering to read this stuff on the GH, in my opinion. The truth is I was never very amusing to begin with and, for the life of me, I can never remember a good joke. That’s because through hard-earned experience I know my timing of the punch-line will always be off a hair or two.

And that’s what they all tell you in those public speaking courses, too, ya know, if you’re no good at telling jokes then you shouldn’t even try to be funny.

The Wife has a rather annoying way of reminding about that. When she has a close friend nearby, she will point at me and coldly demand, “Bamboo, tell your joke!”

I know she’s treating me like some kind of unsocial freak show exhibit when she does this. She knows that I only have one dry, lousy and uniquely unfunny joke that I’ve remembered throughout my whole entire life.

I’ll turn red in the face and say, no, man, I don’t wanna tell my joke and she’ll say, aw, c’mon, it’s funny, my friend wants to hear it, just say it, and I say, no, no, I can’t do that.

That goes back and forth for a while with her friend sitting there uncomfortably until reluctantly in my typical deadpan style I go ahead and I tell it just to shut her up.

Then she makes that face, a sort of knowing and pitiful forced smile, discretely pokes her friend with her elbow and whispers, “See? I told you so.”

Take my wife … please!

But the honorable editors are adamant about this. They want more amusing things, whatever those things may be. They like the idea of modern movie reviews or trivia contests, ya know, maybe inserting questions here and there about Celebrity Fashion Trends or something like that for the casual surfer to divert himself during one of my drier 4,000 word essays on the cultures of extinct tribal nations.

Perhaps, they suggested, a small joke every now and then would please the masses. How else, they yelled at me, will we be able to market this crap?

Hey! I try to do what I can but I can only do so much. And I’m not into marketing anyway. The GH is merely my personal workshop, a retreat for an intense study in the artistry of foolish words, where the exercise of questionable and even worthless content is always free.

Here you can watch the amateur author at work, you can have a browse, but you can’t buy.

If I somehow did spin in a bunch of blatant jokes in between the real stuff, who would I be poking fun at? Myself or the readers? That’s some dangerous juju, man. The GH is no practical joke and this not a verbal confrontation with the reader. I’m no Dirty Harry. I can’t chase readers down the streets of San Francisco, tackle them and force them to have fun at the end of my literary .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world.

Besides, as I tell everyone I know, that thing called fun is vastly overrated.

Common jokes are agonizingly weary clichés to mask the point, to hide the irony. I hate repeating clichés over and over and over again. I know what the readers are thinking and I can only hope that anyone who is daring enough to look inside the GH for context will be lucky enough to discover that before the end there was a middle and a beginning to the story line and then, when the inevitable questions arise after all the excitement is said and done, with all the screaming and shouting and writing and blathering on that even confuses me, then, then they can ask themselves do they really feel lucky?

Well, do ya, Punk?

Thank you, thank you, people; I hope you enjoyed the show … thank you and good night.

Cheers,
Mb