When my friend the poet Deborah Tall was dying from a particularly virulent strain of breast cancer we hit on a theme, a gambit, a ruse—rather than waste precious time telling her a whole joke my job was to tell her the punch lines to non-existent jokes. In this way, we might respectively imagine the unspoken thing while laughing. Punch lines without tedium.
I think only true friends could come up with such an idea.
I called her up one rainy morning and said, “Here’s the first one. Are you ready?” She was.
Here it is, I said.
Then the pig said, I’m not that kind of a pig.
You may or may not find this funny. But we did. There were a hundred unspoken scenarios surrounding that line.
I told Deborah about Kurt Vonnegut Jr. who opined he couldn’t remember the body of a joke that ended: “Hold onto your hat, we could end up miles from here!”
Skipping the tedium of the joke in favor of the punch line was, we decided, one definition of friendship. It was a bit like not telling someone your long, inchoate, Parcheesi board dream first thing in the morning, a dream only you can be interested in.
The other kindness inherent to this game is when you lay a stinker down your friend can get over it quickly:
To be frank, I’d have to change my name.
It was a dark season and the punch lines were a way to laugh fast and move on.
So the Tooth Fairy said: Twenty Bucks, same as in town.
Friendship isn’t always about agreement, debate, long narrations about what’s happening in our daily lives. It can be about lightening each other’s load with nothing more than a game.
Some years ago I heard the great Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges give the keynote address at a conference devoted to Vladimir Nabokov. The event was held at Cornell University where the great Russian novelist taught for a decade. Several academic speakers gave their presentations on modernism, the Russian classics, Nabokov as cultural chameleon, and then Borges, blind, walked out on stage and talked for precisely 7 minutes.
“Games,” he said, “we need more games. Play cards by our own rules.”
When he was done there was silence. Then someone asked, “What about Nabokov?”
“Who’s he?” Borges said.
That, I thought, was a testimonial of true friendship.
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