The Characters of Dirty Jokes | Wesley McNair
Two weeks after the saleswoman told the farm brothers
to wear condoms so she wouldn't get pregnant,
they sit on the porch wondering if it's all right
to take them off. They are about as bewildered
as the man at the bar whose head is tiny
because he asked the fairy godmother, granter of all
wishes, for a little head. Except for a moment,
you get the feeling, none of them have been that happy
about being attached to the preposterous requirements
of the things between their legs, which, in their resting
state, even the elephant thinks are a scream.
"How do you breathe through that thing?" he asks
the naked man. What the naked man replies, looking down
with this new view of himself, the joke doesn't say,
though he's probably not about to laugh. On the other
hand, what was so funny about our own stories
as boys and girls when we heard our first ones,
suddenly wearing patches of hair that had nothing
to do with Sunday school or math class? How lovely
that just as we were discovering the new distance
between ourselves and polite society, the secret
lives of farm girls and priests were pressed
into our ears. Later, when we found ourselves
underneath house mortgages and kids' dental bills,
having taken up the cause of ideal love, they got funny
because they'd never heard of it, still worried,
say, about penis size, like the guy who had his
lengthened by the addition of a baby elephant's
trunk and was doing fine until the cocktail party
where the hostess passed out peanuts.
Their obsessions revealed at the end of their jokes,
they have always been losers, going back to Richard Nixon,
who tried oral sex but never could get it
down Pat, going all the way back to Eve,
thrown out of the Garden for making the first candy,
Adam's peanut brittle. Yet let us celebrate the characters
of dirty jokes, so like us who have made them
in the pure persistence of their desire,
the innocent wish to find a way out of their bodies.
- Wesley McNair
to wear condoms so she wouldn't get pregnant,
they sit on the porch wondering if it's all right
to take them off. They are about as bewildered
as the man at the bar whose head is tiny
because he asked the fairy godmother, granter of all
wishes, for a little head. Except for a moment,
you get the feeling, none of them have been that happy
about being attached to the preposterous requirements
of the things between their legs, which, in their resting
state, even the elephant thinks are a scream.
"How do you breathe through that thing?" he asks
the naked man. What the naked man replies, looking down
with this new view of himself, the joke doesn't say,
though he's probably not about to laugh. On the other
hand, what was so funny about our own stories
as boys and girls when we heard our first ones,
suddenly wearing patches of hair that had nothing
to do with Sunday school or math class? How lovely
that just as we were discovering the new distance
between ourselves and polite society, the secret
lives of farm girls and priests were pressed
into our ears. Later, when we found ourselves
underneath house mortgages and kids' dental bills,
having taken up the cause of ideal love, they got funny
because they'd never heard of it, still worried,
say, about penis size, like the guy who had his
lengthened by the addition of a baby elephant's
trunk and was doing fine until the cocktail party
where the hostess passed out peanuts.
Their obsessions revealed at the end of their jokes,
they have always been losers, going back to Richard Nixon,
who tried oral sex but never could get it
down Pat, going all the way back to Eve,
thrown out of the Garden for making the first candy,
Adam's peanut brittle. Yet let us celebrate the characters
of dirty jokes, so like us who have made them
in the pure persistence of their desire,
the innocent wish to find a way out of their bodies.
- Wesley McNair