This is the story of the funniest joke I ever told.

 

Sometime in the middle of my college education, I was invited to a wedding. I had never met the bride or groom, but my date was a friend of both. The morning of the wedding was warm and beautiful; we had a light breakfast together and drove off to the church in high spirits.

 

The groom and bride both turned up and made the appropriate vows, and everyone headed back to a house in the suburbs for the reception. This was where the problems began, and the main problem was that there were about a hundred guests at the wedding, and no food. As afternoon became late afternoon, and appetizing smells wafted from the kitchen with no actual food emerging, tempers became less joyful. It was revealed that the bride and groom were ardent teetotalers, and also that neither my date nor I knew the way back to town from this house.

 

To make matters worse, one of the groomsmen began making his way around the room, stopping at each female guest and reciting the long story of how he had found Christ after a recent near fatal-accident, the details of which emerged one by one in gruesome detail, each to be held up and admired individually. Unfortunately the sincerity of his conversion from a life of sin was undermined by his habit of inching ever-closer to his audience with each statement, until he ended the story by whispering sweet redemptions in the poor girl’s ear while simultaniously staring down her cleavage. I was sitting at the very end of the room, and trying desperately to think of a way to avoid having my personal space invaded. 

 

I couldn’t come up with anything, and when the creep finished breathing into the ear of the girl next to me, I was so desperate to avoid The Story I leaned over and said, “Hey, would you like to hear a joke?” And without waiting, I told my favorite joke, which goes like this:

 

Two penguins were sitting on an iceburg in the middle of the ocean. The first penguin turns to the second penguin and says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.” And the second penguin says, “Maybe I am.”

 

I had always thought this joke was hysterically funny, but I had never told it to anyone except my brother, who also thought it was hysterically funny. My idea was that everyone around me would laugh, the creepy groomsman would be distracted, and I would slip off to the depressingly non-alcoholic drinks table, and from there to the bathroom, and then out the window and onto the back lawn, which abutted a road where presumably I could hitchhike back to town. Very James Bond, this plan, don’t you think?

 

Unfortunately, I said this joke too loudly, and during one of those lulls in conversation that sometimes occur in a large group of hungry, irritable wedding guests. Therefore, everyone in the room heard my joke. And nobody – nobody! – laughed, except me. In fact, everybody stared at me as though I had suddenly sprouted an extra nostril. Worse, so help me, I couldn’t stop laughing.

 

Then I realized that one other person was laughing - my date. He laughed for a long time. People turned away and started talking again. The creep, unchastised, vanished into the crowd. I looked at my date, who was one of only two percent of our sample group to find my unfunny joke funny, and thought, “I may never find anyone else who likes my jokes. I’d better marry him.” And I did. At our wedding, we had lots of food.

 

 

 

(I hadn’t thought of this incident in years until the other day, when my parents were visiting. My mom read the Echwell book and told me what she thought of it. Then she said, “Is it supposed to be funny?” And I did not know what to say except, “Well, I think it’s funny…” very cautiously.)