'There Are Only Four Jokes Anyway'

My most reliable source of jokes has always been barbers. You see them once a month, you’re a captive audience and so are they. I would never patronize a barber a second time who was a jokeless bore or dedicated dispenser of lousy jokes. A similar codependency develops between bartenders and drinkers. Learning anyone’s taste in jokes and all-around sense of humor is at least as important as knowing their job, marital status and hygiene.

 

“Jokes, superior ones,” Joseph Epstein writes, “are a genre of thought.” What it means to have a sense of humor is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean adolescent goofiness or laughing helplessly at off-color words the way a toddler cracks up at “poop.” A sense of humor is a way of enduring the world and seeing the ridiculousness of ordinary things, especially ourselves. Good jokes are subversive of pomposity and safety-first conventionality. They are little moral bombs.

 

My problem is remembering them. In his poem “Jokes,” Peter Goldsworthy writes: “they refuse to be remembered, / slipping the mind’s fingers, / a shoal of laughter, vanishing.” I can remember, without checking my notes, about a dozen jokes, most dating from twenty or thirty years ago. Some are dependent on events at least that old, which renders them stillborn for most audiences, so my ready supply of jokes is severely limited, unlike my friend and former newspaper colleague John Dieffenbach, now an attorney in Los Angeles. His stockpile of jokes is bottomless, as is Joseph Epstein’s. The conclusion of Goldsworthy’s poem:

 

“There are only four jokes anyway:

the custard pie, and the breaking of taboo,

the game of words, and the thing

we are each most afraid of.”