MICHAEL CHIN was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He’s the author of seven full-length books, including his novel, My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021) and his new short story collection This Year’s Ghost (JackLeg Press, 2025). Find him online at miketchin.com.
At five, my son Riley started telling a joke.
“The cat crossed the street.” He had the timing down. The pause. Best case scenario for our animal-loving friends, a pun or cliché awaited. Riley waited for the gasp or grimace from listeners who assumed the cat would die or at least suffer an injury. “And he didn’t get hurt.”
Riley got what he was looking for. His essential understanding of a joke: one person said something, and another person laughed. Both criteria met, the joke was successful. He was funny.
I think of myself as funny. It’s part of how I charmed my wife. Part of my reputation as a teacher. Part of how I identify among friends. But when I reflect, I find my past humor cringe-worthy. Like the time at a middle school dance when few girls were around, but one of them was Jenny Jacobson. I didn’t know Jenny well and hadn’t had any bad interactions with her. She wasn’t mean or dumb. But she was heavyset. So, I told my friends, “There are only, like, ten girls here.” The pause. “And three of them are Jenny Jacobson.”
My friends laughed and buoyed me on to repeat the joke to friends of friends who had me say it again in front of a crew of older boys—the kind who were mean and dumb—who snickered too, and a girl who rolled her eyes but smiled. I remember the story of this joke in passive terms, that my audience demanded encore performances, and who was I to deny them the pleasure? It wouldn’t occur to me until days later that for how many people I’d shared the joke with—many of them with no reason to feel loyal to me—there was every possibility word got around to Jenny herself what I'd said. Strip the humor—because isn’t every joke incrementally less funny per retelling?—and all that remained was the rotten core. I was telling everyone she was fat.
I thought I was cajoled, enabled, cheered on. But in reality, was I so different from Riley, insisting on telling each new person he came upon the joke about the cat who lived?
A similar timeframe, another joke, I told this one: “What’s the difference between eggs, your wife, and a good blowjob?” The pause. “You can beat your eggs, and you can beat your wife, but you can’t beat a good blowjob!”
Never mind that, at twelve years old, we had no wives and had never used a whisk. I’ll let you guess how much oral sex my best friend and I had received between us when we guffawed over this joke, and he insisted he had to call other friends to share it.
He lifted the receiver of his orange, basketball-shaped, landline phone, then put a finger on the switch hook to repeat the joke back to me, making sure he had it right. His face lit in delight as he punched in the seven digits to call his friend Kevin.
Critic Gershon Legman is credited with saying, “Nobody ever tells a joke for the first time.” There’s no definitive word on whether this was a truly original insight, but the point remains salient.
My son, seven now, doesn’t tell his cat joke anymore but has started asking questions about origins and firsts like who was the first person? and what was the first word? His favorite, the ultimate metaphysical question, “What came first?”
And Legman’s assessment that every joke is a retelling, a riff, a derivation of a preceding joke does set up the question, what was the first joke? or, on an even more rudimentary level, when did humor begin? Canadian psychiatrists Joseph Polimeni and Jeffrey P. Reiss sought the answer in their article “The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor.” They trace humor—at least as it pertains to homo-sapiens—back 35,000 years to aboriginal Australians, at least insofar as “the fundamental ability to perceive or produce humor.”
The article also distinguishes between laughter and humor as related, but not essentially connected items. They write, “humor is the underlying cognitive process that frequently, but not necessarily, leads to laughter,” and, to put a finer point on it, that, “one can laugh without a humorous stimulus and similarly one can experience humor without laughter.”
I stopped laughing at the eggs, wife, blowjob joke on my friend’s second retelling into the phone. Some of it owed to poor delivery. My friend fumbled the punchline, saying can’t when he meant can, and the awkward beat—his own laughter in between—hurt the joke. I could tell that the second friend he called didn’t laugh much either, which was part of my deflation too.
Most of all, though, I stopped laughing because, even then, I saw what was coming. My friend would keep calling other friends, not deterred by a lukewarm response, but rather spurred on that he must continue, if only to end on a high note. His bedroom wall was only so thick, and his mother was in the house.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” my friend said.
I take more shame in jokes than other sins of my past like shoplifting or lying or prolonging a doomed relationship because I’d need a ride home after getting my wisdom teeth pulled.
Telling a joke that’s misogynistic, homophobic, racist, fatphobic, or otherwise regrettable carries layers of shame. There’s the act of having said something offensive, yes. There’s also the explicit truth that I not only said it, but found it funny, and joking about this ugly message normalized and empowered others to laugh too.
Actor, comedian, and writer Seth Rogen said in an interview “there are certain jokes that for sure have not aged well, but I think that’s the nature of comedy.” He went on, “Saying terrible things is bad, so if you’ve said something terrible, then it’s something you should confront in some way, shape, or form.”
I find a sensible, level-headed quality to this sentiment that people change, social norms change, and inevitably, some jokes, like some stories, like some fashion, like some art, will linger past their expiration date. A responsible creator or distributor addresses past mistakes.
Jenny Jacobson sent me a friend request on Facebook years back, around that late-00s, early 10s time when people “friended” everyone they knew or had once known. Jenny and I were never really friends, but we were friendlier than I was with some of my other Facebook friends, so I saw no harm in accepting.
It occurred to me more than once that I might apologize to her for my joke at the dance all those years later. Confront the terrible thing I’d said, in Rogen’s terms. But each time I seriously considered it, I stopped myself. Had Jenny ever heard the joke? Or, if she had, did she still remember it? When I looked at her page, her husband and two sons featured prominently—she’d gotten married and had kids before I had. She’d left high school meanness behind and so, wasn’t it better that I leave it in our collective past too?
I looked up Jenny on Facebook again as I drafted this essay—the first time I’d sought out her page in years. I don’t know when the switch happened, but she’d unfriended me.
“Is Brad there?”
On the third call from the basketball phone, the door rattled. A hard knock from the far side.
“Hold on,” my friend called. “I’m on the phone.”
My friend’s mom did not hold on, but rather opened the door with a sharp, measured precision, just wide enough to show her face, to raise her hand, and to curl her finger to signal my friend must come outside.
He hung up (no telling if Brad had gotten to the phone yet) and closed the door behind him when he went into the hall. I could hear my friend’s mother, ordinarily a warm, soft woman, saying the words disrespectful and stupid with a serrated edge to her voice. She explained she’d heard him make the preceding call and was going to let it slide, but when she heard him make a second call, she had to say something. My friend didn’t volunteer that she must’ve missed the call before that.
But—upon being asked where he’d heard the joke— my friend did volunteer my name.
The door opened again.
I’d like to think my judgment has improved. But I still make bad jokes.
Forgive the long set-up (poison to even a good punchline). Riley was born on a Tuesday. We stayed in the hospital all day Wednesday and Thursday, drove the hour home from Atlanta to rural Georgia where we rented a cockroach-infested house (though I think we were supposed to call them palmetto bugs) adjacent to the college where my wife had secured employment in time for third-trimester insurance. I called the pediatrician’s office, where the next available appointment was Monday morning.
Riley hadn’t eaten well. One of the tell-tale signs he wasn’t getting much milk from our breastfeeding attempts was that he barely peed.
My wife was more attuned that something was wrong than I was and fixed his first bottle of formula. He drank greedily and slipped into his longest, most peaceful sleep of the first five days of his life at nearly three hours.
The pediatrician—whom we agreed on based on good reviews, a small practice, and an air of competence—weighed Riley and reported that he weighed the same five pounds, eight ounces he had when we left the hospital.
My joke, to Riley: “Your diet’s working! You haven’t put on weight!”
The pediatrician didn’t laugh. “That isn’t a good thing.”
My wife volunteered we’d brought formula with us—the organic one, made for sensitive stomachs she’d ordered as a backup, foreseeing breastfeeding might not work. The entire canister materialized from her small purse like a magician pulling an impossibly large object from her hat. The pediatrician directed her to the water cooler in the receptionist area, instructing her to “Make a bottle right now, don’t wait.” I stood frozen in place, cradling Riley, mortified at myself for having joked about his precarious constitution—his life literally in my hands—not to mention that, if I’m being honest, my feelings were hurt at the cold reception to my joke. I was sleep-deprived. I’d intellectually expected a wave of parental emotion, and yet my heart had been caught off guard by its own elasticity—how it expanded far enough to push tears all the way from my chest to my cheeks.
I swore, then and there, I’d protect my son.
And now he jokes.
Now I laugh.
He’s funniest when he’s not trying to be. In unexpectedly quoting a turn of phrase—labeling his dinner medium-yogurt because he heard me call my lunch mediocre; calling himself a cinnamon-tographer as he records home movies on my phone; even when he exclaims what the fuck because he knows it gets a reaction. His mother and I simultaneously cringe and will ourselves not to explode with laughter.
The pause.
We explode with laughter.
We’ll have to rein in the profanity before it goes public.
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
We’ll cross that road. Like the cat.
My son’s jokes are better than mine. No one gets hurt.
Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25
Michael Chin
AND HE DIDN'T GET HURT
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