AFTER I’D HAD A BALDY and slipped into a confessional mood, I said, “I have to admit that I have never understood what Baldy meant when he said that I got the joke. In fact, to be completely honest about it, I don’t think I even know what the joke is. When Baldy said that, I thought that — well, I was flattered — I thought that I must have gotten pretty sophisticated without even noticing it, if I understood things — understood life — the way Baldy did, even if I didn’t understand quite how I was supposed to understand it. It was a joke, I got that. The idea that life is a joke. Okay. But I didn’t get what he meant by the idea that I got the joke, and over the years I have wondered sometimes if Baldy wasn’t just — you know — filling time, saying whatever came into his head, without — ”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Lou. “I think that what he meant — what he might have meant — when he said that you seemed to get the joke, because of the flyer you sent him, the way you had this little flying-saucer-detector scam going — no offense, but it was a kind of swindle, wasn’t it?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I would call it a swindle.”
“Then maybe we could say it was a kind of practical joke, since you didn’t really believe that the gadgets had any value, did you?”
“I wasn’t sure, but — ”
“ — but you suspected that you were taking advantage of the people you sold them to.”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“So what Baldy thought you understood was that there is always a butt to a joke. Joke implies butt of joke. There are no harmless jokes. Every joke is made at someone’s expense. The object of the joke — the butt — might be someone near or someone distant, but there is always someone, somewhere who ends up with ‘KICK ME’ pinned on the seat of his pants, always somebody who’s getting kicked so that somebody else can laugh.”
He was red-faced when he finished, and the room was silent. He looked around at us, then picked up a glass and began polishing it vigorously and said with a shrug, “Anyway, that might be what he meant.”
[to be continued]
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