#1
Q: What’s the difference between a knife fight and a dinner party?
A: About six more glasses of this wine.
#2
Q: Remember that joke I made earlier?
A: Well, now the difference is down to three glasses.
#3
Q: What do you get if you cross me, six glasses of this wine, and Julia’s boyfriend John’s tendency to talk in a condescending manner about weird socioeconomic studies all night?
A: The gnawing feeling inside my stomach. Oh, and also you get me continuing to drink until I try to steal his girlfriend. He is terrible for her. I’m confident we will eventually be together because she keeps laughing at these jokes and John never makes her laugh. Oh, and also you get a terrible, terrible knife fight; that was the original punch line. See, she’s laughing and he’s mad and patronizing me. I’m like a snake or radiology, the way I can sense these things.
#4
Q: Why am I lying on a couch in an apartment where I don’t live?
A: Because Julia’s boyfriend John has depressed me; also, because I’ve been drinking.
#5
Q: Six clowns get in three cabs, and two clowns get on one train. They all come to Julia’s dinner party. The first two clowns leave after eating because they have to work early. The next two leave after dessert, claiming that their schedule demands the same of them in the morning. One clown says he’ll stay, but only for a nightcap, and that he’ll be leaving shortly. His friend says he’ll leave too and they walk back to the train together. This leaves only two clowns and Julia. One of the two remaining clowns may start a knife fight just to frighten the other off so that he leaves as well, and then that will be the end of patronizing academic talk about socioeconomic stuff. Okay, how many clowns are left?
A: Exactly, and I am in bed with Julia. The light outside is moving from black, to blue, to gray again.