Jokes: How to Tell Them?

Thursday night, Rob the Plumber told an excellent joke and I liked that he told it as an exercise in minimalism . . . the joke got funnier on reflection:

this penguin is driving across the desert and his car breaks down in this little town and he finds the one mechanic and the mechanic says he can take a look at his car-- but it's going to take a few minutes-- so the penguin goes and gets a vanilla ice cream cone and he walks back to the mechanic's place and the mechanic says "It looks like you blew a seal" and the penguin wipes his face and says, "no, it's just some ice cream"

and while I got the punch-line of course-- gross-- I also liked thinking about the plot of the joke: the fact that the penguin was driving a car . . . in the desert-- that's funny in itself . . . and of course he's a messy eater-- he's got a beak!-- but I realized all this little by little, after the fact; at happy hour on Friday, I told the joke to the teachers and my friend Liz said, "That's my husband's favorite joke! But he tells it so much better-- he goes on and on about how messy the penguin is, how he's so hot and dying for ice cream and just pigging out and how he's getting ice cream all over his face and he's a total mess-- he build it up and builds it up-- and then does the punch line" and then we had a meta-discussion on how to tell the joke-- we are all English teachers-- and it made me think of the "Willie Nelson" joke and the many discussions we've had on how to tell it . . . in the end it's a matter of preference . . . The Aristocrats is an exercise in this.