By Mark Connelly
We all know jokes. Most of us have an anthology of one-liners, gags, bits, and funny stories collected from TikTok, the Tonight Show, coworkers, and friends. Some jokes we can’t wait to share, and some – wildly inappropriate and deeply offensive – we keep to ourselves, like a guilty pleasure. There are the jokes suited for banquets and those better told in bowling alleys. There are the innocent amusing ones we tell to liven up a dull party or comfort a doleful chum. And there are the ones we only reveal to trusted friends of the same gender and only after three drinks.
I recently added a joke to my collection and tell whenever I can. I share it with fellow passengers waiting for a flight or people in line at the DMV. And it’s not a new one. I heard it my freshman year in college over fifty years ago. Nick Pantazis – who insisted on being called Greek – shared it our first week. He had the room across from mine, and we and our roommates had spent the day unpacking. Around three o’clock we took a break and ordered a pizza. It arrived burnt and brittle but piping hot. We sat on suitcases and chugged Cokes from the vending machine. We were all strangers and broke the ice by telling jokes and stories.
Greek had spent the summer in Athens on an exchange program and told us how the locals were bemused by American students tossing firecrackers on the Fourth of July. The night of the moon landing, their Yankee celebrations reached Bacchanalian pitch with teenage couples from Highland Park and Great Neck jumping naked into a fountain. I had nothing that good to share. I spent the summer mowing lawns but remembered a few quips I heard from Jean Shepherd on WOR. Our break ended with Greek relating a final joke. It sounded dated even then –- like a lame Henny Youngman crack — and I wondered if he got it from his father or an uncle. Mildly sexist by today’s standards, it was amusing at best, hardly a winner. Nobody laughed. I think I smiled. Then we crushed the pizza debris into a trashcan, finished our Cokes, and went back to work.
Greek and I parted ways at the end of the semester. He pledged a fraternity and left the dorm for the ramshackle Delta house on Wilson Drive. We had separate majors and only saw each other in passing over the next four years. The alphabet separated us at graduation so that by the time his name was called, I was already backstage chugging shots of Jameson with a girlfriend.
But his joke, for some reason, lodged in my mind, but I never shared it. I never heard it again or saw even a vague reference in print. Then two months ago Greek’s obit appeared in the alumni magazine. Nick Pantazis had died months before in Chicago, having operated the family catering business inherited from his father. The Facebook link showed him, heavier and graying, beaming beside a towering wedding cake. Services had been held at St. Basil’s on Ashland Avenue. There was no mention of a spouse or children.
And so now, waiting for a delayed flight or a shareholder meeting to start, I tell strangers Greek’s joke. No one breaks up or even chuckles. At best it earns a nod of amused recognition or a thin smile. But I pass it on as his legacy. And, given my age, if it’s shared by others in the future, it may soon be mine.
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Mark Connelly’s fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Milwaukee Magazine, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The Great American Literary Magazine, Home Planet News, Smoky Blue Arts and Literary Magazine, Change Seven, Light and Dark, 34th Parallel, The Chamber Magazine, and Digital Papercut. He received an Editor’s Choice Award in Carve Magazine’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest in 2014; in 2015 he received Third Place in Red Savina Review’s Albert Camus Prize for Short Fiction. In 2005 Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.