The Life of a Joke.

This week, just one drawing and a little story.

The joke was discovered at 2:45 p.m. in a local cafe as Harry was ordering a coffee and a croissant.

It wasn’t where, or even when, he ever expected to come across a joke and yet, there it was.

He repeated the joke again in his mind, his internal monologue imagining an audience listening to it as he did. Not a huge audience, just some close friends that he conveniently imagined hanging on his every word.

It was funny for the second time.

He left the cafe, crossed the street and began walking home. While passing the laundromat he repeated it to himself again.

Still good.

He arrived home, and pulling out his notebook full of half-baked ideas, a shopping list and at least two of his passwords, wrote it down.

He looked at the words scrawled across the page. It was real now.

He read it out loud this time, the sound of his voice suddenly and terrifyingly legitimising the former thought.

It wasn’t quite as funny.

So he said it differently. He changed the tone, he tried different speeds of delivery, he put pauses in, he took them out.

With each iteration, the joke morphed and changed and then Harry remembered he’d not even eaten the croissant which was now squashed and weirdly soft and sweaty in its now translucent paper bag.

Harry wondered if there was a joke about sweaty croissants.

There wasn’t.

He went back to his joke. He told himself the joke again, but this time someone else was telling it and he was in the audience.

Harry began wondering if comedy had been a bad idea. Maybe he should have stuck with science.

Harry pushed his parents’ concerns out of his mind and focused again on the joke.

…but not quite.

“The Scientific Method!” Harry thought. This joke must be peer-reviewed.

And so Harry spent the next few hours steering the group chat into the kind of conversation where he could deploy the joke in the wild.

Of the ten people in the group only one of them replied with three contiguous ha’s, but that one person always laughed at everything Harry said, so they obviously couldn’t be trusted.

Harry decided to send the joke out on social media.

Harry posted the joke.

But then he suddenly realised it might be a good joke, so deleted it in case it really was a good joke.

He looked back at the joke scrawled down on the page and rewrote it with slightly nicer handwriting.

Not liking the fact he now had the same joke written twice on the page, he ripped out the page and wrote it down on his laptop instead.

He stared at the joke on the screen.

Harry opened another tab.

He looked at the news and was suddenly reminded of the currently unfolding celebrity news that everyone was talking about and realised his joke might be misinterpreted as a terrible comment against that one famous person everyone loves.

Harry closed all his tabs and thought about what he might be doing as a scientist.

He looked outside, the place he’d only just been.

Harry slowly shut his laptop. The soft flump of the lid closing would have felt particularly unsatisfying were it not for his sudden urge to eat a soft, slightly sweaty croissant, and go for another walk.

It would be a full five years later that Harry finally told the joke in person, and to his delight, everyone in the lab found it hysterical.

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