Jokes

A little over twelve hours ago, I arrived in London.

At lunch at a posh Italian restaurant that seemed to be populated solely with middle-aged to older women from the neighborhood who looked like their occupation was to keep up their "lov-ly" appearances and do it was the utmost elegance, I heard a joke that I had heard at a rooftop party in Brooklyn the day after Michael Jackson died. Although the British woman who told it left out the introduction that I had heard on American jokes, the punchline was the same: when Farrah Fawcett died she was given a wish at the gates of heaven because she had been good in her life. What did she say? "I want all children to be safe."In Brooklyn the joke was concluded with the words, "And so Michael Jackson died." In London, the British woman made the punchline an active sentence: "And so God killed Michael Jackson." She said.

On the Brooklyn rooftop, I had heard the joke set up with a good kid dying of lukemia and St. Peter says, "You've been good all your life; I'm going to grant you a wish." And the kid says, "I don't want good people to suffer." So Farah Fawcett dies, and at the Gates of Heaven, St. Peter says to her, "You have been good all your life, I'm going to grant you a wish." When the British woman told the joke, there was no St. Peter, it opens with Farah Fawcett being told to make a wish.

I wondered as I sat there opposite my great uncle to whom it would take ages to explain my musings. Is the St. Peter's Gate joke formula so universal that this joke sprouted up at a similar time all over the world or did one person think of it and in hours it was all around the world? And why in the UK was it not told with introduction? Is the child's request for no good people to suffer and only Farah Fawcett dying unreasonable in the British psyche? Do Americans require more set up? Or did it just changed without specific deep reasons? I want to reveal this joke's journey like how people reveal what they've said after a game of Telephone and find out more about the way they hear, think, and articulate so that I can find these things out about my mother culture and the culture in which I am just about to dive into. To make somebody really laugh, you have to know the person.