My grandfather had a set of jokes that he told repeatedly. One of them had the punch line, “many hands make light work.” It strikes me now that there was a racist element to the joke, vaguely Asian. There was something Confucian about the punch line; he may have even used a slight Asian accent. It didn’t strike me as odd at the time, just boring. Anyway, the story goes that a professor is giving a lecture in a crowded auditorium. Suddenly, the lights go out. The professor calms everyone down by saying he has a proven method for fixing the situation. He tells everyone to raise their hands high in the air; everyone obeys. Suddenly the lights come back on. The professor stands at the front of the class with smile on his face. He says to the room, “this proves the old adage, ‘many hands make light work!’” Hee haw, hee haw.
I can’t stand when people repeat jokes. It’s about all I can do not to just get up and leave the room. I don’t get it; do people not reaize they’re repeating useless information, or do they simply not care? Okay, it’s true that I have a boiling, seething lake of anger below my calm, nice, well-bred, Midwestern “surface,” but bullshit like repeating stupid jokes makes life almost unbearable. Plus my grandfather was a liar and I’m absolutely sure I haven’t gotten over that.
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There's just something about the grumpy tone of this that I like. The narrator - probably you - is just so honest about his mood and his opinion here, that it's refreshing. Maybe because we so rarely see this in print.
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