Saturday, May 14, 2005

Never use my jokes

My good friend Chris, who also likes spending time writing blogs, told me yesterday I shouldn't publish my own jokes on the Internet. According to him, my humor is very particular and its success factor seems to be its good timing. His explanation was kind of wordy, but he let out a very interesting argument, which I will now enunciate with my own words as the first law of Transitive Joking:
Never repeat any of Marcelo's jokes. They are kind of funny, but only if you are there.
I thought about that a couple of seconds and got to the conclusion that, even if he was probably right, I would have never got to this same conclusion myself, since I rarely try to recycle my own jokes and use them with other people. What kind of person would that make me? Although I know for a fact that some people keep their own repertoire ready for every new person they meet. Some Germans are actually like that. Especially when it comes to meeting a Colombian...

Back in school, when I was about 14 or 15 years old, some people told me: man, please, don't tell any more jokes. It wasn't that they were peeing their pants and wanted me to stop the fun, but they meant it seriously: Marcelo, you are not funny. "Well, I know that." I said, "That's why I don't tell jokes. I just make comments."

"I just make comments" became a joke itself. How many times are you supposed to defend your comments? Is it really your fault when your comments are kind of ironic and it's hard to tell whether you are joking or not? But try to explain that to your whole class. They will fall off their chairs... but perhaps laughing at you?

No comments: