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the blacksnake which crawled in a torn pocket and out his fly: “Ah knowed you was black, and ah knowed you was long, but ah nevah knowed you had eyes!”); to simulate the facial expressions of those with strabismus, harelips, and receding jaws.
    You couldn’t, however, use blue material with parents or teachers, or even, given the era, with “good” girls as opposed to those who were “bad,” those, that is, who went beyond necking and engaged in mutual “petting” or even, in some cases, more. To entertain the respectable, Kellog therefore had to acquire a repertoire of hygienic jokes of the sort encountered in magazines in the dentist’s waiting room or heard on the radio, but the trouble was everybody saw or heard those, and it was devastating to be beat to the punch-line by your audience. That was the trouble with jokes as such: once uttered, they were available to all, and it was precisely the funniest ones that were most repeated, so you always ran the risk of either not getting a laugh or, getting one, being identified as not original. Kellog would have liked to be socially acceptable in the routine way, namely, without making an especial effort, but as that had proved impossible, what he craved now was to be unique, superior to the herd, a headliner, the one-and-only, and that could hardly come about with twice-told material.
    But it was one thing to want to invent a joke, and another to do it. Where do you begin? If not restrained by prudery in the matter of sex and prudence with respect to your audience (not all of whose affiliations might be known to the comedian), a headstart could be gained by using real or implied foul language or bigot’s epithets: “‘Oh, how I love Dick,’ said Richard’s girl.”… “A nigger goes into a drugstore to buy rubbers. The druggist is this slick little sheeny…” But if obliged to keep a civil tongue in your head, you had to work much harder to arrive at something that was sufficiently biting to amuse but at which even the victim could not protest without attracting more derision. Fat people were God-given perfection, the ultimate; but eminently usable were the bald, the nearsighted, the bowlegged and the knock-kneed, those with impedimented speech, the effeminate male, and the unmarried female over forty.
    Cruelty might not necessarily be funny, but nothing was funnier. This became clear to Kellog before he was out of his teens, but it was also evident to him that he had little gift for invention. He could tell jokes, even perform them with the vocal effects and bodily movements of a trained actor, but he could not cut one from the whole cloth. Soon he had to buy by mail, for twenty-five cents, a book entitled The World’s Hundred Best Jokes and then its sequel, 100 More , etc., and believed he could breathe easy for the moment with this stockpile behind it. But as ill luck would have it, one of the new acquaintances he had made through the exercise of wit plucked one of these volumes from the pocket of Jack’s raincoat and held it high. “Hey, look where Kellog gets his jokes!”
    But being so exposed had less effect on his other classmates than he at first had feared. In spite of the entertainment he had afforded them for months, most were indifferent to its sources. He was the one who got the laugh when he grabbed the other boy’s right hand and thrust it aloft. “Hey, look where Riggins gets his lovin’: Miss Rosie Palm!” He was helped by a blush of Riggins’ that was so violent as to seem a prelude to hemorrhage, for by chance the straitlaced girl on whom Riggins had a crush was standing nearby at the time and though a reaction of disgust on her part would have been regrettable, her simper of amusement was disastrous: in the passion of self-pity Riggins upon the moment suspected her of not being the virgin he had supposed but rather a kind of slut, who would