How to Ruin a Joke by Andy Simmons.

This is an article I read in the Reader's Digest long time back. And I had saved it.

A classic joke goes like this:

A nurse rushes into an exam room and says, "Doctor, doctor, there's an invisible man in the waiting room."The doctor says, "Tell him I can't see him."

Pretty simple, right?

Here's how I tell it: "A nurse--her name is Joyce--feels a presence in the waiting room. She looks around but sees nothing. She jumps up from her desk, carefully replaces her chair, and runs down the lavender-hued hallway to the doctor's office. She knocks on the door. No response. He's not there. Where can he be? She continues down the hall, admiring a lithograph of an 18th-century Mississippi paddleboat along the way." By this time, my audience has left, but I soldier on."She bursts into the exam room and says, 'Doctor, doctor!' The doctor, I should mention, is a urologist with a degree from Harvard, which is where my nephew..."

 

You get the idea. I’m an embellisher. I can’t leave a simple gag alone.

I'm not the only joke-challenged member of the family. My sister's worse than I am. Her problem: She can’t remember them. ‘A nurse rushes into an exam room and says ...' Uh, let me start over again. 'A nurse rushes into a waiting ...' No, it's not the waiting room. She came from the waiting room. Let me start over again. 'A doctor rushes into...' No, wait ..."

 

My uncle's different. He's guilty of taking a perfectly fine joke and selling it as second coming of Oscar Wilde: "Okay, this is a good one. Ready? No, really, ready? Okay, fasten your seat belts. Ready? 'A nurse...' Got it? A nurse? Okay, ready? 'A nurse rushes into an exam room and says, "Doctor, doctor, there's an invisible man in the waiting room."' Now, this is where it gets funny. Ready?

No one is ever ready, so they tune out before he gets to the punch line.

My father's in a financial firm, where he hears all the jokes before they hit the Web. And he lets you know he knows them all by telling you one of them. He knows that most people don’t like jokes. So he slips them under the radar: "I was chatting with Ben Bernanke the other day. You know Ben,, don’t you? The Fed chief? Anyway, we were reviewing the Fed's policy on long-term interest rates, and he told me it had evolved into its current iteration only after a nurse rushed into an exam room and said, 'Doctor, doctor, there's ...' Hey , where are you going? "

No one in family has ever finished this joke.

But as bad as it is not able to tell a joke, there's something worse: not being able to listen to one. Take my cousin Mitch.

"Why couldn't the doctor see him?" he said.

"Because he's invisible," I said.

"Now, I didn’t get that. I thought the doctor couldn't see him because he was his patient."

"Well, yeah, okay, but the fact that the guy is invisible ..."

"Could the nurse see him?"

"No. She's the one who said he was invisible ..."

"How'd she know he was there?"

"Because he ..."

"When you say he was invisible, does that mean his clothes were invisible too?"

Here's where I tried to walk away.

"Because if his clothes weren't invisible," Mitch said, stepping between me and the exit, "then the doctor could see him, right?"

"Yeah, but ..."

"At least his clothes."

"I guess ..."

"Unless he was naked."

"Okay, he was naked!"

"Why would he go to his doctor naked?"

Next time you see my family and someone's telling a joke, do yourself a favour: Make yourself invisible.

Soup for the Soul.

This is a story of The Soup. A story that most of my friends know. A story that has been exaggerated each time it’s been told. So exaggerated that even I don’t remember what really happened that day. The day I made solid soup.

It was my final practical exam in Homescience.  And practicals in Homescience meant cooking. The exam had three parts. First part, the theoretical part where you get a question and you write down the appropriate menu, ingredients needed and the procedure. And it was open book. Yeah, open book. We could look at the recipes that we’d written throughout the year. But it wasn’t that easy. If you didn’t write an ingredient, you actually wouldn’t get the ingredient during the exam. People had made flour-less cakes and milk-less kheer.  Well, I’d written Sweet Corn Soup as part of the menu. I thought, “This has got to be easy”. Look at the recipe and copy. A cake walk. The second part was cooking the menu. I’d started off pretty well. I started making the soup last. I knew the recipe really well and I thought, “I just have to stick to the recipe and I’m done”. I did stick to the recipe. Well, sort of. I don’t really know how I did it but The Soup I made was..erm..solid. And I realised that it had this characteristic smell. My friend came over to my bench. She probably noticed the disgusted expression on my face. Before I knew it, she smelt the soup and fainted. I remember her cursing me for a whole week. Well, so I kept the soup covered with a plate. Didn't want anyone else to faint, you see.

The third part was viva. The first thing the teacher told me to do was to lift the plate. "Ugh”, I thought. She gave me the cold eye. So I lifted the plate. And BAM! The aroma of soup filled the kitchen (or lab as we were supposed to call it). I had already gotten accustomed to the smell.  The next thing she did was pick up a spoon. She asked me what it was. I said, "Erm, Sweet corn soup. You'll have to eat it. It's solid." My pathetic attempt at humour. It's 'solid'. Eh eh, geddit? I sighed and passed her the bowl of The Soup. To understand what she went through in the next couple of moments, I'll have to describe how The Soup looked like. Brown (too much soya sauce), peppercorns stuck in the jelly-like soup (I'd forgotten to crush the peppercorns), salty and well, jelly-solid (Too much egg. Egg, yeah, you heard it right). Oh oh, and no corn. Too much smartness I showed. So she put one whole spoonful of The Soup in her mouth. And...well..just walked away.

That was the end my viva.

Living Cynic.

A Cynic, you say? Cynicism. A word I used to use without really understanding it. Not that I understand it that well now. But I guess I can speak about it now that I atleast know what it might mean. I don't want to start with writing the Oxford dictionary meaning of Cynicism. But I’ll atleast make you Google it.

Probably the worst thing that can happen to someone is becoming a Cynic. Negative always. Not the best thing to keep thinking about. Would you rather keep thinking why it's bad than thinking why it's not good? Why would you want to find reasons to make something seem bad? I don't mean 'bad' in the normal sense. I couldn't really think of any better word. Yeah, I couldn't think of a more negative word. That itself makes me less of a Cynic.

I've always tried to think positive. It's hard. Very hard. It's pretty easy saying something's bad. Finding what's good in the bad thing is tough. Take the famous half-full, half-empty metaphorical glass. It's a hot topic for debate. I could really go on about the damn glass of water. I could. Say, I was a Cynic. I'd start by saying, "Why glass of water? I want wine.". Or probably coke for lesser mortals like me. See, the use of "lesser mortals". Hah, I'm good with this Cynicism thing. Probably not, according to Cynics. No not at all. I'm doing it all wrong according to them.

Why live? If you've used this phrase way too often, congratulations. You're at the first stage of becoming a Cynic. I guess, if you add something like "Why live when we're going to die anyway?" would promote you to the second stage. If you want to go to a higher stage, that itself will promote you to the third stage. See? It's not that complicated. Now, you start by spreading Cynicism. Ask questions. And keep asking questions to which there are no answers. Not rhetorical questions. I mean questions that have answers but other people have no answer. And, you've guessed it right. You're now at the fourth stage. Higher? Well, now that you're at the fourth stage, you'll have to tell me the unforetold secrets of being promoted to the next stage. Uh, right. I just came up with all of this. I apologize, Cynics. I probably will go to hell. We all probably will, as you say.

And now think about it. Would you rather point out everything that I wrote wrong or think about the stuff I wrote right. I'd love some constructive criticism. Well, I atleast hope you find something worthwhile. I really do hope. Even though the "procedure" of becoming a Cynic that I wrote above is all crap, I can tell you one thing. If you're still reading what I've written and if you are thinking about it, you've come down one stage. And if you now stop reading it, atleast you're one stage lower than before. And that's how I'd like to be Optimistic.

I don't know about cancer. I don't know about AIDS. But I do think dying optimistic is better than living Cynic. I'm not saying we should all hold each other’s hands and sing "Lets Make This World a Better Place". I'm just saying, why waste time thinking about why it's not something else. It's not going to be something else. That's it. It's not.

Well, yeah. Before the Cynics come hunting for me, I'd just like to end by saying- Peace. I love you too Cynics *wink wink*.