At work this afternoon, Ben was
expounding lightheartedly to Priscilla on certain figures of history. Since
she's only a couple cubicles down, my ears perked up when I heard him mention
Peter the Great.
I nearly levitated from my seat
before flying to Priscilla's cubicle, and waited for half a pause in Ben's
litany before verbally stepping in: "Hey, do you know what Peter the
Great, William the Conqueror, and Winnie the Pooh all have in common?"
(This is based on a very lame joke I'd heard on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" several years ago.)
Then I killed my pan and body
language so that by the time Priscilla (who knows me too well!) asked, "Is
this going to be a bad one?" I was able to answer with a terse, bored,
"Yes." And resumed my silence.
Ben had an inspired look on his
face, but it quickly degraded by stages to I Can Figure This One Out; then –
obviously and wisely mentally discarding several really stupid answers – to
This Is a Tough One; to Oh,
This Is Going to Be Very, Very Bad. Then at last his lips disappeared, and he
shook his head in honest defeat.
"All three have the same middle
name," I answered matter-of-factly. And – I never expected this – he
cringed and his shoulders went up and his face crumpled and he actually
imploded slightly, like a dwarf star beginning to collapse into neutronium.
I've seen Hugo do this, when I mercilessly leave an especially horrid pun with
him – but Ben (like a cat drawn to people allergic to felines), Ben also gets a
chuckle and giggle out of black-and-white straight-line-only Hugo going through
those same tortured contortions at his jokes!
Fate was having a field day in the
office this afternoon. Because at this point Hugo unwisely came up, and Ben
told him how I'd probably – definitely – told the worst one-liner of my life.
Hugo's shields came up with a near-audible clang (I could smell the motor oil),
and he said firmly, "I don't want to hear it!"
If Hugo can be an unmovable object,
then Ben, of course, becomes the irresistible force. "No," he
answered with equal resolve, "you have to hear it. If I hurt, you have to
hurt." Then he gave the riddle. Hugo didn't want the solution (he's very
wise, but can be a pushover), but Ben pressed me to give the answer anyway. And
when I did, Hugo repeated both Ben's contortions, and his contention that I'd
risen to a new low. I grinned – beamed – and left the three of them (Priscilla
was groaning again) and returned to my desk.
Epilog: Ben was so delighted by his
defeat that he told this reeking joke to several more people during the rest of
the afternoon (and no doubt he's sleeping (and giggling) on the couch tonight,
having held down his wife to tell her, too) – a greater compliment than I could
ever aspire to. And that's exactly how I responded to his brilliant and
disgusting pun on Stephen King: I was telling his stinker to other
people for days afterward.
This is how punning differs from
chess, tennis, and gladiatorial combat: the defeated admires the coup de grâce
of his/her own dénouement… and often adds it to his/her armory.
Here, though, NB, it was not a pun:
just a lame one-liner / riddle impossible to solve, yet logical in solution,
and imbecilic in meaning.
I love it.
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