Prelude
And then all eyes fell on me.
“A joke or an embarrassing story about yourself,” was the rule.
An embarrassing story, fine, but you know as well as I that the unwritten expectation there was that it be an entertaining embarrassing story. My embarrassments are many, but their entertainment value is nil. So it remained for me to tell a joke. (Can you imagine?)
I explained to them that, as my wife and son well know, my joke buffer is only three jokes deep, and it filled up when I was six. So I warned them in advance, “My jokes are the jokes of a six year old.”
Joke #1
The first was a joke my brother told many, many years ago when we were very young and he had a big book (which he still has) of jokes and tricks. I wondered if anyone would get it.
I looked down the table to my left, and then I looked down the table to my right.
“What goes around a button?” I asked.
They sat in silence. No one tried to answer.
I waited a moment.
“Well?” someone asked.
“A goat!” I said with a mock expectant smile on my face.
I got blank stares. Blank stares from every single person at that table, except for Bill down at the end who laughed out loud.
“A goat!?” the others asked.
“Well, like an opera singer goes around a-singin'”, I said, “and a dog goes around a-barkin’, a goat goes around a-buttin’.”
There were groans. They guys from India were silent.
Joke #2
Unfulfilled by the first joke, they demanded another.
I looked down the table both ways and explained that this one was one my mother taught me when I was young. “She called it a shaggy dog story,” I said.
“Ok, so tell us this shaggy dog story.”
Which I proceeded to do.
“It goes like this,” I began. “Herman, Sherman and Kerman were twins,” I said, stopping to look at them all. “Except for Ralph, whose hair was,” and at this point I held up my hand with my thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Except for Ralph whose hair was this color.”
Silence, as you might imagine.
“I don’t get it,” someone said.
“No, it’s a shaggy dog story,” I said. “They don’t make sense!”
And now my reputation is cemented.