Sherri came back to the bar and looked at him curiously. “So could an anemic, myopic, skeptic be somebody with a pale face who doesn’t believe he’s shortsighted?” she asked.
“Could be,” Corrigan agreed nonchalantly.
“So is that funny too?”
“I’m supposed to be odd,” he reminded her. “Why would you care how it strikes me?”
She corrected herself. “Would they have thought it was funny back in Ireland years ago? I’m just curious.”
Corrigan made a show of subjecting the proposition to profound analysis. “Ingenious, yes. Funny, not really,” he told her.
“Okay,” she invited. “Now tell me why not.”
Normally, Corrigan would have known better than to try, and hence wouldn’t have raised the subject in the first place. This time, however, he was aware that he was really talking to a trio of TMC 11s and a SuperCray in Xylog’s basement. It was about time, he decided, that they began really exercising their circuits to earn their keep.
“Imagine an insomniac, and imagine an anemic,” he replied. “How do you picture them?”
Sherri frowned. “I guess one of them looks whiter.”
Corrigan had to make an effort not to guffaw out loud. It was pure Horace and Sarah, leaping clear over the point. “Okay, that’s the anemic,” he agreed. “What does the other one look like?”
“How could I possibly know?”
“All right, let’s try it another way. Why can’t insomniacs sleep?”
That was easy. The system almost fell over, reciting from its lookup tables. “Well, it could be from any of a number of possible causes. Metabolic malfunction, hormonal imbalance, chemical stimulation by any of . . .” Sherri broke off when she saw that Corrigan was shaking his head.
“They worry too much,” he said.
“Maybe that too. But not all of them, necessarily,” she answered.
“Never mind the others. The one we’re talking about does.”
“All right.”
“Ah, now, you’re accepting the fact, but you don’t see the `why.’ What is it that he worries about?” Corrigan pressed. Sherri was looking bewildered. Never before had a simple question of hers led into anything like this. Corrigan made a tossing-away motion. “His boss is an arsehole, and his genius isn’t being recognized at work; the car he just got fixed is making expensive noises again; his bank balance is printed in blood; and his wife, his girlfriend, and his mortgage are all a month overdue at the same time. His life is a mess. Subconsciously we feel fortunate and superior by comparison, and that makes us smile. So he’s funny. The anemic isn’t.”
“Was I supposed to have thought all that?” Sherri asked, looking aghast.
“No. You’re supposed to have felt it. It’s the same someone-else-is-getting-it-and-I’m-not feeling that makes us laugh at banana peels and custard pies.”
From the look on Sherri’s face, Corrigan could have been revealing the secret of the philosopher’s stone. At the same time, he might as well have been expressing it in Swahili.
“And that’s it?” she said.
“Of course not. That’s only the start. You want more?” Corrigan tossed out a hand. “Myopic means shortsighted, which in many contexts has connotations of stupidity and ineptness. Not funny, see? Being dyslexic might not be funny if you’re dyslexic, but to the rest of us it conjures up pictures of getting everything the wrong way around: typical Irish.”
“So we’re superior again? Is that the idea?”
“Right. It reinforces the implication that we had before, and the way the two themes interweave is satisfying.” Corrigan couldn’t resist adding, “Of course, the unstated allusion to musical counterpoint is obvious, which makes the metaphor doubly satisfying.”
“Yeah. . . . Right.”
He went on. “Your making him a skeptic doesn’t really work—skeptics are much too logical and sensible to be funny. The agnostic is funny because he doesn’t know which way he thinks, which maintains the symmetry by casting him as a psychological dyslexic. And lastly, juxtaposing God with dog is delightfully irreverent, which a lot of people won’t admit to being outwardly—but inside they find it hilarious. . . . So there you are. That’s why it’s funny. You did ask.”
Sherri seemed to have so many questions jostling for attention at once that her eyes just glazed. Her eyebrows knitted, and her lips writhed. Finally she said, “I don’t believe that you had to piece together all those connections. The number of permutations is too great. You’d never get through them.” In its eagerness to know, the system was forgetting what was and was not an appropriate comment for a cocktail waitress.