Traditional Jokes and Anecdotes, Part 5

Jokes Are Not Always Funny

A man walks into a bar.  A million times this has happened to begin a funny story.  The trouble is this man usually doesn’t walk into a bar.  He is a nice Jewish man, middle-class, a professional, and he is actually lost, and the only lights he sees on the highway come from this honkytonk kind of a place, where he never would find himself under normal circumstances.  This means the anecdote spells itself out in words and actions that everybody knows but also at the same time in tones and innuendoes, hints and allusions, that sup[rise everybody who listens to it being told, except those people—probably most of the audience here—who find it hard to believe that going into a bar (or in some cultures you could call it a tavern, a pub, or a roadhouse) is something quite abnormal, nearly unheard of, and certainly at the ambiguous point of sinful and forbidden.

A man opens the door of a noisy bar, does not wait to let his eyes adjust to the flashing lights, walks through the crowd of persons drinking, shouting, dancing and egging one another on to fights, makes his way up to the bar.  There is no need to identify him explicitly as a Jew.  The way the story-teller changes his voice to start the joke and the way the audience is gathered, with all previous anecdotes and jokes they have been telling, that’s enough to fill out the background—and also to foreground the direction the whole narrative will go, plot by plot by plot, so much you could plotz. Once people start to laugh, they will continue. No matter what details are forgotten, misconstrued or misplaced.

Unfamiliar with the protocol of such establishments, the man now stands patiently waiting for someone to approach him to ask what he wants.  His role is to be passive. Others, however, instead of making the polite gesture the man foolishly expects, push him, prod him, whisper obscenities in his ear, spraying him with their noxious fumes, and making him feel most uncomfortable.  Nevertheless, he manages to raise his arm and give a signal to the person serving drinks up and down the bar and thus whom he assumes to be a person in charge.  Expectations and assumptions are the fuel that drive this whole story.

In due course, therefore, the bar tender, a middle-aged black man, comes up to the man. 

“What y’all having?” he asks. 

At this point silence.  The man is overawed, confused, not sure he has been asked a question or not.  

The language is not one he knows.  He is not sure it is a language at all.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but what did you say?” he answers.

The attempt at politeness is stunning, so out of place, like the man himself.

“Bloody hell,” the black man says and turns away.

The man who walked in to the bar has never experienced anything of this sort.  You would think he has been in so many jokes that he would be used it by now.  But obviously he never remembers from one anecdote to another, and ever narrative for him is like a new beginning.  His life has always been calm and controlled.  Very few unexpected events have happened, but they were always relatively mild and he could cope. He could always call on family, friends, neighbors or members of the community to help him when needed.  Not everything has been hugely successful.  He is neither rich nor powerful.  However, nothing has happened to make him doubt the basic rationality of the universe and the eventual moral structures of history.  In brief, he is a bit discombobulated.  This is his typical role in the stories of this sort, the generic requirements for him to be there at all.

In desperation, he turns to one of the rough beings standing next to him at the bar who, a rather gigantic bottle of beer in his hand, which he swills at an enormous pace, though it never seem to empty:

“Is there perhaps a telephone nearby I can use?” he says.

“What you say there, buddy?” the other replies.

“I wish to call for help as my vehicle has broken down and I am not sure where I am.”

“You what?”

“I need a telephone.”

“A what? Can’t understand a word you’re saying.  I’m out-a here.”

The man who walked into the bar is now even more deeply troubled, confused and getting desperate.  Though we at least know that he comes out of these situations on top because his innocence and naïveté remain intact while those around him blunder into their own traps, there is no way we can warn him.  It is not as though we were little children sitting in a park watching a Punch and Judy Show and shrieking out, “Look behind you!” or “No, he’s not in there.  Look in the other basket!” or something of the sort.  Life doesn’t follow the rules of Tinker Bell and Peter Pan, and no amount of shouting will bring a dead fairy back to life.  The man has to endure everything that comes his way until the end of the joke.  He will be, rest assured, as surprised this time as he has always been.  But though we know all this long before the joke starts, why do we still laugh?

The man turns in the other direction to try a second time.  His persistence is at once ridiculously persistent because there is no way either a second attempt can succeed: in fairy tales and other folk narratives, actions always need to come in a sequence of three, sometimes spread between three brothers or sisters, but always so that the pattern of failure and frustration can be confirmed, so that the damning up of anxiety can be intensified to the point where a third attempt will release all that energy of is pent up; and also because anything less would necessitate the decomposition of the joke and the reformation of a true, historical event.

Thus on his other side is an equally obtuse and boorish individual.  Again when he pleads for help, using words, concepts and allusions totally out of place in the bar and thus meaningless—unimaginable to the representative of brute, elemental humanity, this second habitué of the drinking establishment is nonplussed and walks away, giving the man a punch to show his contempt.

Then comes the third turn in the choreography of this story, the one everyone in the audience has been expecting and which the story teller has tried to delay as long as possible.  One hardly needs to set it in motion before the crowd listening to the story start shouting out he punch line they have heard so many times before.  The third person in the bar being a woman this time, as rough, crude and unfamiliar with anything outside of her own immediate experience as any of the others whose presence has pressed in on the lonely stranger who has walked in and turned their gathering into something no of them can articulate but which they have increasingly sensed as destructive and likely to upset everything they have ever known, has the rudimentary wit to answer the request with a remark that allows all the powerful energies in the bar, outside in the darkness that isolates the tavern from the rest of the world, and the invisible, improbable otherness of where the man has come from and wishes to return to.   She asks the man why he needs a telephone since everybody you ever want to speak to is in this bar. 

Various members of the audience shout out the punch line which the man is about to give.  The trouble is, you surely have guessed, is that each person has a different version.  The joke works in so many ways, on so many levels, and has such a long history—in the earliest recorded versions there were no telephones, nor telegraph posts, and perhaps not even postal services.  The essential wit of the tale doesn’t require mechanical or institutionalized means of communication, only that the man who comes into this strange, isolated and virtually uncivilized world as the representative of another way of seeing, feeling, thinking about the universe, he has something that overwhelms everyone else in the room.  In some form of reality, of course, everyone who hears the story has been in a similar situation, has found themselves caught in a situation where their alienation and incomprehensibility to the rest of humanity seems on the verge of being defeated, crushed, annihilated by the majority of men and women.  The joke has at its core a wish fulfillment dream.  For a split second it will give Jewish intellect, history and pride an illusion of victory.  That is what all the hearers are waiting for. 

The man who entered the bar turns to the woman and says….