How to Interpret a Joke

Why you never question a drunk:


A woman was shopping at her local supermarket where she selected a half-gallon of 2% milk, a carton of eggs, a quart of orange juice, a head of romaine lettuce, a 2 lb. can of coffee, and a 1 lb. package of bacon.

As she was unloading her items on the conveyor belt to check out, a drunk standing behind her watched as she placed the items in front of the cashier. While the cashier was ringing up her purchases, the drunk calmly stated, "You must be single."

The woman was a bit startled by this proclamation, but she was intrigued by the derelicts intuition, since she was indeed single. She looked at her six items on the belt and saw nothing particularly unusual about her selections that could have tipped off the drunk to her marital status. Curiosity got the better of her and she said, "Well, you know what, you're absolutely correct. But how on earth did you know that?"

The drunk replied, " 'Cause you're ugly."

I got in trouble some months ago for sending that e-mail joke along. I learned a lesson. People tend to take jokes at face value. If it's crude on one level, the logic goes, so is the content, form and subtext.

The punch-line may indeed be crude. It's not crude to the extent of a Howard Stern toss-off or the rudeness of most sitcoms - this reliance on sarcasm in the form of a dubiously archetypical family unit. But rude nonetheless. The form of the joke itself, however, is pure jackpot gold. What made me laugh out loud after reading it - silently, with, I swear, my lips pursed - was the pacing of the joke itself, its rhythmic paydirt. The misleading direction, the faux voice of wisdom, the succinct four syllable epoch. They all contribute to a sense of bamboozlement and bedazzlement that is rare in the written word - or at least mass emailings.

However, language purists (By that I mean those of an opinion, like myself, that the semiotic relationship between language [signs] and their remnants [in the case of the positive or negative signified] is strong in the mind and hence the soul. Therefore, language should be carefully construed in a positive manner. The difference between this and political correctness is that the changes are made at an individual and community level, from the bottom around, not through academia or regulations on down.) may have a point. The skill in telling a joke in itself does not justify the poisoning of the communal wells and individual psyches. Are not too many people affected, embittered and embattled by socially induced and eventually internalized claims of ugliness, of unwantedness?

The argument, of course, has merit. But to dismiss a joke as merely the set-up to a crude comment in purpose is to miss the essence and existence of a joke: a telling of a story. And, as with any fine story worth being told, there is not only the text, there is the subtext - the underlying story in the reading of the elements against and within the whole of the text. Through this effect, a different message or moral emerges. Those who look only at the surface text of the above anecdote and read it literally see merely a mocking. They hear a disparaging speech-act by a wizened and world-weary voice from the corners of the market place. A man who has been around long enough to understand the ways of the world and has opted to step out, to offer his Ecclesiastical pearls while casually rummaging through the remains of the capitalist infrastructure.

The reader assumes that the message that the drunk gives is informed and is therefore the message that the protagonist - and therefore, the reader - should accept.

With all that being said, the drunken man - the voice from the shadows - is not a voice of wisdom. He's drunk! It's the voice of foolishness!

Singles: We are not alone because we're ugly. We are alone because our standards are high.

Dang.