The fool, the hero, the straight man–if you tell jokes, you need these three guys the way Betsy Ross needed red and white and blue.
In the physicist/bartender joke, the bartender plays straight man–his naive questions move the story along. The straight man piques the listener’s curiosity about stuff the storyteller wants to tell–and distracts the listener from stuff that has to stay hidden until the punch line.
One of my favorite jokes has three slightly-misdirecting straight men, two of whom are women. (Grrrr! No wonder they call English “the Microsoft of languages”!)
On board a train speeding toward Casablanca, four strangers were sharing one compartment: a Nazi officer, a beautiful maiden, an old peasant woman, and a handsome French patriot.
For mile upon mile they traveled in silence.
Suddenly–the train had entered a tunnel–darkness fell. And the silence was broken by the sound of a kiss, quite loud, followed by the sound, even louder, of a slap! As the train roared out of the tunnel, the Nazi had a rueful expression and one cheek much redder than the other. Still no one spoke. But what were they thinking?
The old woman was thinking, “That filthy German–she gave him what he deserved.”
The German was thinking, “How unfair! That Frenchman steals a kiss, and I’m the one she slaps!”
The maiden was thinking, “Strange–why did the German kiss that old woman?”
The French patriot was thinking, “Oh, what a clever patriot I am! The darkness falls–I kiss my hand–I slap a Nazi–and no one is the wiser!”
This joke also has a hero–the Frenchman–and a fool–the Nazi. “Fool jokes”–just a couple of memes ago, we were calling them “blonde jokes”–go back to the primitive humor of laughing at people who pratfall or poop in their pants. “Hero jokes” have a winner as well as a loser–and the winner is usually a stand-in for you.
In real life, each of us plays both fool and hero. But real life doesn’t have enough George-Burns/Dean-Martin/Marge-Simpson types to beg us to tell them stuff we want to tell them.
With this intro, imagine old Dino is here, looking handsomely looped, eager to ask me how it went last night:
Dino: (tunefully) So tell me about this Dino meeting last night.
Betsy: Not a Dino meeting, it was a Howard Dean meeting.
Dino: A meeting in a bar–so how bad a time could anybody have there?
Betsy: I had a good time–about the best time I ever had with a hundred-plus people I never met before. Vote for Dean!
Dino: Well, that’s amore. Now, say good night, Gracie.
Betsy: Hey, wrong straight man! But, you’re right, that’s enough. Good night, Gracie.