Nerding Day: Jokes, Puns & Riddles

Four thousand years ago, in ancient Sumeria, somebody carved this joke:

“A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”

Not funny! However, this joke might’ve been funny four thousand years ago. Maybe the joke teller did a wacky Sumerian voice. Or did Sumerian arm motions, indicating the dog wore a funny Sumerian hat. We’ll never know. We can’t know the comedic mindscape of four thousand years ago. So to us, this joke stinks. It’s a pointless statement. It leaves the mind hanging. Reading that joke feels like missing a trapeze catch. Which brings me to today’s piece of hotdoggery: Jokes, Puns & Riddles by David Allen Clark. Publication date: 1968.

Jokes, Puns & Riddles gave me that alienating Sumerian joke experience for 288 pages. The book is one big “huh?” It is approximately, literally, one thousand non-jokes. That shouldn’t be possible! This is recent writing. I shouldn’t read a professional-looking comedy book, from a mere 55 years ago, and feel like the author is Mesopotamian Man With Heatstroke. But here we are. A real publisher printed stacks of this, in 1968. 1968 is not alien to us. They had jokes, then. Comedians in 1968 achieved The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour! The Mel Brooks movie The Producers! Bob Newhart’s revolutionary stand-up album from eight years earlier! So if somebody from 1968 promises me a joke, I expect at least a little bit of a joke. I won’t settle for “what if a random thing happened and we drew a picture of it?”

A “SILLY DILLIE” indeed. And this SILLY DILLIE is the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a joke for you: what if an iceberg was also…a kumquat? That is the level this book is operating at. Half of this book is random stuff, with a Swingin’ Sixties line drawing accompanying it, because…comedy!

Ha ha – wow! It do be like that sometimes, I guess, if you draw a flipped-over car on a piece of paper. There’s no situation funnier than a made-up situation where weird stuff is weird. Isn’t that right, Little Boy In That Sailor Outfit No Boys Ever Really Wore?

Lemme be clear: I’m not cropping out the ends of these jokes. That’s just how they end. And yes, comedy ages fast. But it’s not a ding dang quart of milk. David Allen Clark should tell me one recognizable joke in 288 pages. Instead, his book imprisoned my mind in a comedy-less void. It was like a Sumerian stand-up stashed me in some Saw dungeon, for 288 pages. I know I’m hammering away at that pagecount. I have to! We must comprehend its horror. 288 pages is not an acceptable length for a joke book. Do you know that? I know that, because as a child my two passions were The Scholastic Book Fair and Not Having Much Book Money. I bought every joke book I could, because they were the length and thickness of a napkin, and priced to match. Those lengths were appropriate. Joke books should stop at a few dozen pages. It’s near-impossible to write a longer book of straight-up one-line jokes. If you have one atom of emotional intelligence, you stop after a few hundred puns. That’s a few hundred puns too late. But your mind’s brakes do kick in. In return, we let you remain part of society. We thank you for not random-bombing our psyches, and labeling it “Farm Humor”.

You know that societal deal I just outlined? David Allen Clark rejected it. He wrote this book manifesto-style, for 288 pages. His list of jokes has the length and heft of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That’s like making a hundred-hour-long movie, or a thousand-story-tall building. No one would do that! You’d need psychopathic serial killer-level confidence to riff beyond that horizon. You know who has that confidence? David Allen “Serial Killer Name” Clark. He did so many not-jokes. All the not-jokes. He even not-joked so hard, he bonked into some sorta kinda punchlines along the way.

Take that, critics! The words “lion” and “line” have general similarity in English! That is a thing, even if you point that thing out after a long weird cryptid windup!

“What if a young Albert Einstein was a skunk?” That is almost a joke premise, and it’s almost written here. But no. What’s here instead? Smells. Also, “Elbert.” Which is a name, here, because this guy decided that. Therefore: comedy. Therefore, David Allen Clark has mastered comedy. David Allen Clark’s mastery is so profound, he breaks his tome out into twenty-five separate chapters, categorized by what he feels are twenty-five different ways he jokes good.

This might be a good time to say I found this book on a stoop. That is normal, here in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. People often leave their used, free books on their building’s stoop. That way the books get seen by passerby, and rejected by passerby. Later, they get rained on. It’s a beloved local tradition of almost recycling. Also, I’m weird. I grab stoop books sometimes! I grabbed this for the vintage cover art and the 1% chance of jokes. As promised, there is art. But it does not help. The art emphasizes the truth about David Allen Clark. He thinks he’s mastered 25 modes of good comedy. In actuality, he’s mastered two weak ones. His two modes are “random” and “random + violent.” We’ve covered the first one in depth – and we can always go deeper.

Don’t get me wrong: there are patterns to this randomness. It isn’t just wacky zigzags toward nowhere. There is also randomness using Native American people as comedy props.

Because they have metaphorical names sometimes, you see.

Because they…uh…they are just huge morons, you see? That’s David Allen Clark’s understanding of Native America. Also I’m skipping four entire jokes making one sweaty pun out of a word that’s mostly a slur. Why bother showing you those, when other violence awaits? Like I said, Clark’s two modes are “random” and “random + violent.” Mode #2 is most of the book cover. On the front: an Itchy and Scratchy situation without the mirth or self-awareness, roosting atop a hateful dental patient.

On the back: a Victorian child casting a man into hell.

Now I get it! The snake in the picture is Satan (“Garden Of Eden” Special Character Art DLC Edition). Great news: they also give us a variant of Damned Man in the book’s text, with an even less likely explanation for his fall.

Literally from cover to cover, this book spells out a string of gruesome threats. It reads like if the Clockwork Orange guys had less culture. Why does David Allen Clark do this? Why lash out like this? My guess is that’s how he tries to relate to people. Much like Jack The Ripper, or most male YouTube celebrities, David Allen Clark lacks any communication skills beyond surprise ultraviolence. If you told him the two steps of a joke are “setup” and “punchline”, he’d wonder how you mispronounced “bloodbath” two ways.

Does the violence include domestic violence? My dearest Hotdogger: it revels in it.

This book also tackles the broad violence of war. It asks the big question: will we all die in a burst of atomic armageddon? And if you depict a scientist flatly describing that, did you write a joke?

Don’t worry: the threats eventually subside. By the end of the book, with his very last “joke”, D.A.C. returns to Comedy Mode Number One (“random”) for a rapid-fire list of words that could mean different things if you decided they meant different things.

And then it ends. But the mystery continues. How did this book happen? Who is this guy? Bad news: I cannot turn up a dang thing about him. He’s google-proof. He makes Morishige Shunsen look like he has a Social Security number. Good news: this could mean David Allen Clark is hidden away for all our benefit. Maybe he’s in some kind of secret mega-prison. Maybe the imminent new U.S. president (Richard Nixon) disappeared David Allen Clark, because this country’s only big enough for one megalomaniac. Bad news: Nixon probably would’ve put Clark to use. I can imagine Nixon turning Clark into an extra C.R.E.E.P. plumber, with the Mission Archetype Role of “WILD CARD BITCHES”. He’s probably free to this day. But I will not rest until we put David Allen Clark in the David Allen Clink. That’s why I’m analyzing the hell out of this book’s dedication page. It’s the one spot where David Allen Clark gave us all the clues, Mister Policeman. There is some kind of answer there. This book’s dedication is one of the more ominous thank-yous I’ve ever encountered.

Why, Kathy, why! Why would you cause the following riddle-me-this to riddle my brain with confusion?

Explain yourself, Kathy. Explain your endorsement of this nebulous Future Pornhub Category.

Most of all, Kathy, tell us what happened to the crocodiles. What happened to the crocodiles, Kathy. What is David Allen Clark doing with the crocodiles.

Anyway I give up. “I give up” is what I said out loud, several times, in the desolate middle stretch of this stoop-crap book. It’s hateful to me, and I’m re-stooping it the very next time we get rain. And yet…there is one piece of value here. One miracle, in fact. Because if there’s one animals/creativity concept older than the Sumerian dog in the bar, it is the “thousand monkeys with typewriters.” They say if you unleash enough random output, you might get Shakespeare, or something. I’ve never believed in that concept…until now. One magic moment in this despicable book renewed my faith in the power of a relentless primate expressin’ stuff. Back in 1968, David Allen Clark tucked this burst of astonishment into the hellish center of his nightmare-book:

That joke is…good? Or at least iconic? I say that because it’s almost word for word the ending of the 1977 film Annie Hall. They hang the entire movie on Woody Allen reciting that joke. It works! And the worst human ever to author a joke book wrote up that same joke, nine years earlier. Don’t get me wrong: this joke probably isn’t original to Woody Allen or to David Allen “No Relation?” Clark. Woody presents it as an old chestnut. David could not write down a joke if you paid him to be Woody’s stenographer. I think they’re both recording it from somebody else. But what a breath of fresh air it is to read David Allen Clark’s musty old text, and rediscover one joke worth printing. What a better world this would be if its David Allen Clarks committed themselves to documenting other people’s brilliance, instead of foisting their originality onto their victims. I’ll never respect or like David Allen Clark. You know, because of the Nixon crimes I decided he did. But also because of his joke writing. Yet for one moment of sublime grace, D.A.C. did the right thing, and stole someone’s joke. He’s so awful, he made me like an instance of joke theft. It might be a crime. But it’s the lesser of 288 pages of evils.

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