A Joke

You wanna hear a joke?

A man walks into a bar
The bar is filled with mourners
The mourners look at the man
He looks at them

There's silence

Why is this man in the bar?
The mourners think
To themselves

And the man thinks--

Did I accidentally wander
Into a Mourner's Bar
When I was supposed to wander into
A bar where the bartender is a horse

Or there are people of various religions
Mingling with each other

Or some other odd occurrence is taking place?

A bar full of mourners—
Thought the man

How am I supposed to make a joke out of this?

But the man--being part of a joke--has to walk into the bar
And sit down
And order a drink
From the bartender
Who is not a horse
And who also seems to be a mourner

'I'd like a vodka cranberry,' says the man
'We don't serve alcohol here,' says the bartender
'Are you kidding me?' asks the man
Confident that now this is not going to wind up
Being any kind of decent joke

'Sorry,' says the bartender, 'I can get you a coffee'

The man has no idea how to make coffee work
As a joke

Oh sure, there are jokes about coffee

But not coffee in a bar

Nevertheless—

'Sure,' he says

Because what else is he going to say?

He can't just walk out of the bar again
Not until something funny happens

He gets his coffee from the bartender
Who then proceeds to disappear into a room behind the bar
Presumably to have a good cry

Without a bartender to talk to
The man realizes that if he's going to find a joke
He's going to have to find it
Somewhere in this room of mourners

He looks around
Trying to see if there could possibly be
A dog on a unicycle
Or a bear juggling pizzas
But no such luck

No such luck at all

After an endless minute,

The man sits down next to a woman
Who seems to be the least sad
Of all the people there

He strikes up a conversation
That he hopes will lead him
To a punchline

'Well,' he says, 'My wife sure is crazy'
'Oh really,' says the woman, staring off into the distance
'Yup,' says the man, 'She sure is.'

There's a moment of total silence
When the only sound in the bar
Is sniffling and a specific sort of sigh
That can only be brought about
By pure despair

'How about you,' the man says to the woman,
'Are you married?'

'I was,' says the woman

And the man immediately regrets

Asking the question

'My husband died,' she continues

'We all decided to come here after the funeral

Because this was his favorite place'

The man looks around the room
At all the mourners
And realizes they do all look
Vaguely related

'Did he, uh, die in any sort of, uh, humorous way?' asks the man
'Misdiagnosed heart condition,' says the woman
'Ahhhhhh,' says the man, wishing he could say 'Ahhhh' forever instead of having to continue on in this joke that clearly wasn't a joke, but some sort of awful abstract story that nobody will ever read

'Can I ask what you're doing here,' says the woman to the man

'Oh,' he says, 'I'm supposed to be in a joke'
'Really,' she says, 'You don't seem very funny'
'I'm not,' says the man, 'Something funny is supposed to happen to me and I'm supposed to respond to it in a humorous way, but I, myself, am not very funny, no.'
'Well, nothing funny is going to happen to you in here,' says the woman
'Yes,' says the man, 'I'm slowly coming to terms with that'

The man and the woman sit there for a moment
Not sure what to do next
Neither able to get up and walk away from each other
Because where would they go?

They were both trapped inside a joke
Whether they wanted to be or not

And even if the joke was, as the man suspected,
Some sort of odd, deconstruction of a joke
It was still a joke
And a joke is impenetrable
Until somebody gets to the punchline

'You know,' says the woman, after what feels like years,
'My husband was very funny'

'Was he?' says the man, although at this point,
He's not so much paying attention
As he is praying for death

'Yes,' says the woman, 'He could always get you to laugh'

'Well then,' says the man, 'I wish he was here now'

There's a second
A nail of a second
Hammered into time
When a grieving, unhappy person
Smiles

It is one of the rarest things
To occur in nature
But it does, in fact, occur

'I wish he was here now'

And the woman
The bereaved woman
Smiles

And so the man smiles
Realizing that perhaps
He had landed on something
Of a punchline
After all

But he still didn't quite feel as though
He was in a joke
Conversely, he also wasn't sure that he wasn't in a joke either

The woman put her hand
On his hand
And she says 'Thank you'

Somewhere in the bar
Someone began singing a little song
A sad, lonely little song
That then got carried along
By the voices of the other people in the bar

The bartender came out from the room in the back
Sat down at the piano
And began to play along
With the singing mourners
Who were still very much mourners
But who were now doing something

Other than sniffling and sighing

They all joined hands
And hugged
And held onto each other
Including the man
Who was in the middle of all this

The woman, who had her arm around him, asked--

'How do you feel?'

The man, at this point, was so moved by what he was experiencing
That he found it hard to put into words
But not wanting to be rude, he says--

'I feel--funny.'

And at that very moment
A horse
Walked into the bar