Ruining a joke for attention.

Adding profanity to make a clean joke entertaining is eating shit.

I don’t know why I remembered this, but I did.

In fact, I’ve remembered this for about a decade, probably because of how stupid it was.

Many years ago, in a hazy, distant time and otherworldly consciousness, I was standing in a crowd, waiting for a punk show to start. I was at some dive bar, probably in Gainesville, Florida, and probably alone. I don’t remember the year. I don’t remember the bar. I don’t remember the band.

The doors had just opened. Soon, the act came out and started setting gear and tuning up. The frontman was downstage, adjusting the microphone stand and tuning his guitar. He decided to break the ice with some crowd work.

“Anyone know a joke?” he called out to the audience.

At first, people murmured and chuckled sheepishly like they usually do while trying to gauge the seriousness of the request. Bands often address the crowd directly or indirectly and it isn’t always clear if their questions are rhetorical.

But he asked again. “Come on, anyone got a good joke?”

That’s when some completely random, nameless, faceless, anonymous person without an identity answered him.

“What did the zero say to the eight?” she yelled out.

I sighed, not because I have anything against simple, youthful jokes and not because I think I’m above telling or hearing them. I cringed at the prospect of her telling this tired joke in particular. It seemed utterly uninspired given the weight of the guitarist’s request, the golden opportunity to have her voice heard, and the heft of the crowd giving her attention. Anybody there could have yelled out anything, but she fancied herself to be the strongest candidate to take the reins, shout the loudest, and offer this joke.

I knew the punchline (“nice belt”) ever since I heard the joke as a child, but apparently the frontman wasn’t familiar with it.

“What did the. . . zero. . . say to the. . . eight?” he repeated, not really following. “Like numbers? I don’t know, what did it say?”

The girl paused for a gleeful moment before triumphantly calling back, “Nice belt, asshole!”

Nice belt — asshole?

What? Why?

The punchline was "nice belt", period. Not asshole. There was no asshole. There never was an asshole. Why “asshole”? Why did she say that? There was absolutely no aggression in this children’s joke, either stated or implied. Why did she need to add “asshole” to a joke that was not only clean, but already complete without it? Given what we knew about the number characters, there’d be no reason for either of them to speak that way to the other.

The frontman emitted a half-hearted laugh, never once looking up from his plucking. “Nice belt. . . asshole. . .” he echoed, smiling sheepishly, clearly trying to remain polite in the face of the obvious rigmarole he helped perpetuate.

Then he quickly moved on, made a bit more small talk, and the band started their set.

Did this girl throw in the ungodly profanity because she felt the audience of this punk show needed something edgier than what her joke could offer? Did she think her reinterpretation would seem punker-than-thou and thus accepted by the community? It’s reasonable to aspire to that, but if so, why settle for that joke in the first place?

Was her wordsmithery the product of a last second maneuver, because as she felt the punchline coming off her lips, she knew in the moment the joke had completely, utterly flopped? Did she figure she could think quickly and salvage her doomed opportunity with a half-hearted appeal to punk folk’s apparently-simple minds? That they’d be gratified with any and all inappropriate language?

See, my problem with this whole GD incident is that there is already dissonance between how the general, non-punk public characterizes the punk subculture. Normal people see punks as any combination of violent, irrationally angry, rude, irresponsible, immature, and spreading “negative” values (whatever those are). . . etc. But anyone who’s spent even one second around the punk world would know it’s actually anything but that: it’s inclusive, progressive, morally responsible, humane, supportive of mental health, and championing the underdog all the time. So while a short interaction like this may not exactly be changing the course of history, it does inject an unnecessarily aggressive, immature, and thoughtless bit of tension into a scene that wholly did not need nor want it.

Anyway, I will give one million dollars in cash to anybody reading this who was at the show where this took place. You don’t even have to prove it. But you have to be telling the truth. ✍︎