Punchline

He had never been able to explain the joke to anyone else.  No one found it funny.  No one could even see how it worked, or was supposed to work. 
 
And yet, it made him laugh every time he thought of it.  He would sometimes write it down again, just for amusement.  And again.  And again. 
 
He would imagine someone else telling him the joke and he would imagine laughing.  In his imagination, he was imagining it being told by an imaginary person of his own imagining.  But even this construct could not comprehend the joke or tell it with sufficient conviction. 
 
He stood in front of a mirror.  He set up several mirrors so that several versions of himself could simultaneously chorus the joke, and an audience made up only of versions of himself crowed with laughter.  Each him caught the contagious laughter of each other him and the laughing carried on, around and around until the reflections were worn out. 
 
He wrote it in birthday cards and visitors books and on tax returns and any other pieces of paper on which he was asked to write.  
 
He would think of it, it would pop in to his head at moments when he was supposed to be thinking about something else and he would break down, be shushed, apologise, just about hold it together.   
 
No one understood why he was laughing, so he told them the joke, then he explained the joke, and they still didn’t understand why he was laughing, but at least they knew what he was laughing at. 
 
They knew the words of the joke, the raw materials from which it was built.  They could recite it, some of them.  It wasn’t a long joke.  It wasn’t difficult to remember, when you heard it so many times, when you read it on so many pieces of paper.
 
Some of them would even tell each other the joke and then laugh along.  They told it to him and he joined in with them, laughing longer then everyone else, his laughter coming from a different place.    
 
He waited until he was alone and told it to himself again, because no one told that joke better than him, and this time he laughed even longer and harder than before.
 
Someone found him, hours after he died of a heart attack.  They joked that he must have died from laughing at that damned joke of his, then they felt bad for laughing.  Not because it was disrespectful, but because they found this throwaway quip funnier than his joke.
 
They began to notice that his absence had changed the structure of their world – their lives would work differently from now on.  A subtle realignment was already under way.
 
At the funeral, the joke was read out as part of the eulogy.  Everyone in attendance had heard it many times before and they knew it as something that had never made them laugh.  But this was a different world now, it was a slightly different shape.