The next issue was as to the rewrites
that would certainly have to be undertaken.
Could we be so sure that they would be accepted?
Surely no one expected the whole thing
to spring up from the hidden genius of the place
handsomely equipped to meet all its future needs,
with answers, snappy comebacks, and a flair
for the jocular riposte that would allow it
to brave any questions that might be put to it.
And, assuming the future would allow
for adjustments both routine and unexpected,
how would they in that case have us go about it?
Blow by blow, always having a last look
down in the gutter for fallen screws and hammers
before advancing the next rung up the ladder?
Or would we throw it all together first,
have a trial run and call a final meeting
in advance of the Grand Opening?
At this point
the prevailing mood of uncertainty
was suddenly interrupted by a chuckle
on the part of one from whom reckless nonchalance
had come to be expected. “What? You mean
this isn’t the Grand Opening?” One or two laughed,
though not I. Those who did laugh did so nervously,
as if they expected everybody
to join in for a sociable guffaw, but then
had been taken off guard by the chilling silence.
Likely they hadn’t even been paying
attention and had laughed from a motor reflex
brought on by having sit on their rumps for so long.
Most of us feigned not to have heard this voice
of one lone jackal in the wilderness, though we
went on to discuss how we should deal with the threat
of a breach. It seemed we had two choices:
either we could ignore this jester entirely,
begin at the beginning, Chapter One, Verse One,
and pretend the whole thing had arisen
of itself from scratch, more or less. Or, secondly,
we could acknowledge the premise that indeed things
had once been otherwise. And this option
entailed in turn a different set of problems
to be solved. We could attempt a reconstruction,
dignified with the rudiments of myth
and replete with period dress, billowy clouds,
goods to be distributed to men and women
in pairs, and whatever else was needed.
This, though, would mean the technical difficulty
of double-casting and would bring along the risk
that half of us would soon persuade ourselves
that this preamble might in fact serve for the whole,
and thus we’d find ourselves in a situation
in which there’d be no question of taking
those precarious but necessary first steps
out of sunny antiquity. Or, assuming
we didn’t wish to get into all that,
the fact of the breach could be hinted at from time
to time in asides or thinly veiled allusions.
The objection was brought up, however,
that this sort of device had seen its day and that,
while at one time it had been something you couldn’t
utilize enough, the way everything
had fallen out in recent days seemed to dictate
a radically innovative new approach
and, to complement this, an equally
new and radical approach to innovation.
Or, if such innovations and new approaches
weren’t in the offing from the get go,
we should at least be thinking in that direction.
No argument, however, was advanced against
the view that, no matter what solution
we embraced, it had to be one that included
humor. As long as there was opportunity
built in for a good laugh from time to time…
as long as we could ensure ourselves of that much,
everything else would manage to dream itself up.
“The birth of event out of the spirit
of mirth,” we said. But then it became apparent
how hard it is for people to remember jokes.
“How odd,” I thought to myself, “but it’s true.
If someone were to solicit me for a joke
right now, I doubt I could dredge up a single one.
How is it that I know what a joke is,
though, seeing that I have no concrete memory
of any particular joke?” To remedy
this admittedly quite embarrassing
difficulty, we came up with a new technique
for adding to our fund of jokes that went like this:
First, we busied ourselves in an effort
to recall as many as we could off the top
of our heads (and as we had been left with not much
more than our heads by now, this was in truth
about the only way we could go about it).
In all, we were able to come up with no more
than a dozen or so, and half of these
came from a man who, though no one felt he possessed
anything like a gift for making people laugh
(the pretense of claiming he could do so
was the only humorous thing about this man),
had an especially good memory for jokes
that he had heard repeated long ago.
Of course, there were many more than a dozen “jokes”
that came up for serious consideration.
But the majority were rejected –
some because they were maimed in one way or other
(either through the vicissitudes that commonly
obtained in the process of translation
from one language into another, or because
elements of the joke had suffered corruption
through poor transmission, faulty memory,
etc.), others because they were riddles
rather than bona fide jokes, and yet a third class
due to the objectionable nature
of the material (there were minors present,
after all, not to mention a menacingly
vocal group who refused to tolerate
the circumstance that there seemed to be among us
some who were made the butt of the joke more often
and to greater detriment than others…
this last point more than anything else placed severe
strictures on what was and wasn’t acceptable).
You can’t imagine how much time we spent
in drawing up this list of joke criteria.
To bring to a conclusion this tired episode
from which nobody at the time derived
much amusement, it was suggested that new jokes
might be created via the apparently
timeless procedure known as word-of-mouth.
Twelve individuals were chosen and knighted
as our “joke-initiates”. It was then decreed
that jokes would be passed along through the crowd
on a person-to-person basis. Joke-tellings
that consisted of anything more than a joke,
its teller and a single auditor
were prohibited on pain of ostracism
from our select group who fancied to be acting
on behalf of the fabled whole. What’s more,
it was to be carried out strictly orally,
and there was to be no writing or recording
equipment at the tellers’ disposal.
Before we knew it, a veritable archive
of jokes had been assembled. How funny they were
I can’t say, as by the time we’d gotten
to the point at which we might call upon the scribes
to jot down our jokes, it had become a tiring
and merely procedural exercise,
and I found myself altogether unable
to listen to a joke without at the same time
pausing to run my index finger down
that hastily compiled list of criteria.
In this way, however, we assembled our jokes.
[Next: The Lesser Accord]