Spoken in jest

I would like to announce that I finally gained an essential older sister skill: the ability to pretend not to know the punchlines of jokes that I actually learned years ago. I used to just whip out the punchline, thereby disappointing the six-year-old out of five minutes of joke-telling, but I'm older and wiser now.

Rebecca: How do you put an elephant in the refrigerator?

Me: (knowing perfectly well how you put an elephant in the refrigerator) I don't know, how?

Rebecca: (laughing so hard she doubles up like a jackknife) You open the refrigerator, you put the elephant in and you close the refrigerator!

This joke, by the way, has several sequels that rely on it. For example, How do you put a giraffe in the refrigerator? Here, the jokist is relying on the listener to say you open the refrigerator, put the giraffe in and close the refrigerator, so that's exactly what I said. Not so, impractical one. You open the refrigerator, take the elephant out, and only then will you have room for the giraffe.

There's another one, and another one after that. I don't care to transcribe them all, but suffice it to say that by the time she was done with those and had started out on another set, I felt as if I'd gone to a ghost-story session to humor the hosts and then realized that they were actually a Nordic tribe reciting the Prose Edda.

But actually, seeing her laugh made me laugh. And seeing me laugh made her laugh still more.

I think the secret to a good sisterly relationship in a large family is to encounter each other constantly, almost as if by accident, always parting on mutual good terms. I'm hoping that she hunted up Cecilia and is now learning more of my oldest jokes to bring to me.

I like to think that there's something deeply and elusively good about us human beings, that one of our natural instincts is to want to make other people laugh. Why is that? It's one of those touches of the divine in us, I guess.

Now, do you know any of these jokes? They're good ones. Go tell them to your sisters.

[By the way, the word jokist isn't in the dictionary, but I got it out of Krazy Kat, and if it was good enough for George Herriman it's good enough for me.]