some people don’t know the funniest joke in the universe. some know it, but don’t recognize either its humor or its importance as metaphor. everybody knows the minimalist clown gag, when a little toy car drives into the center of the ring and it parks and the tiny door opens and a single clown gets out, lights a cigarette, smokes it down to the filter- all the while the audience is laughing so hard that milk is shooting out of their noses from this morning’s cereal- puts the cigarette butt under the right front tire of his little clown car and then drives off. few know what it actually portends. (which is better, one clown or a crowd of clowns? which is better to have inside a tiny car?)
if you don’t get that, there’s always this one: “this joke is so bad, when your mother heard it, she gave birth to you!” the first time I heard that joke it made me laugh so hard I felt a shiver run up my spine, climing into my brain, finding its way backwards through time and space to those first gasping, wailing, neonatal seconds when I’d just heard a joke so funny that it made me simultaneously vomit and shit with laughter.
if you still don’t get either of them, they aren’t about the audience. you’re supposed to be in that audience, laughing hard enough to pop blood vessels in your cheeks, asking a doctor to give you an emergency trachaeotomy because of the strain your primal laughter has put on your glottis. however, if he gets it too, he will be in no shape to do such a thing.
the joke is: we are all disappointed that more clowns didn’t come out of that clown car, even though they would’ve just been clowns. and the same way there are not not clowns in that car, in the second joke, hell, it’s not not funny. if it’s funny, then how am I alive, if my mother had to meet such a condition to give birth to me? if that joke was funny, how do I exist? I don’t, because it’s funny, and it’s funny because I’m there to laugh at it in the face of a very good argument for why, if I laugh, then I’m not real.
yes, that’s a straw man argument, but that’s what a joke is: misrepresentation. a circumstance which is completely unrelated to its imposed or implied consequence. I persuade you that a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar means you laugh, or that a man bringing dogshit home to his wife in his hands, saying, “Honey, look what I almost stepped in!” does not mean a serious mental health defect, but that you should laugh. the proof of this is when you laugh hard enough to make your brain pop open like a seed, sprouting a grandfather oak which makes chuckling sounds in the wind.
