My apologies to clowns. And... everyone else.

Randy just got home from a monthly meeting and he had a joke for me. He often returns from this particular meeting with jokes but not anything I would ever repeat; not anything Randy would ever repeat either, since he usually gets about halfway through one before he resorts to wild gesturing and muttering, "you know, you know" because he can't bring himself to actually utter the punchline. I think the birth of his granddaughter rendered him physically incapable of articulating certain words and/or phrases that breech an understood base level of decorum. It's endearing, really; his mouth keeps moving but it's mostly high-pitched squeaks. Like one of those bark collars, but one that's activated solely by crude references to female genitalia.

So here's his joke. That he told. That I liked. And laughed at.

A clown is walking hand in hand with a child into the woods. The child looks up at the clown and says, "It's really dark out here! I'm scared! Let's go back!"

The clown pats the child's hand and smiles. Keeps walking deeper into the woods.

"It gets darker and scarier the farther we go!" whines the child. "Let's go back!"

The clown shakes his head and keeps walking.

"Mister, please!" the child says, "It's dark and spooky out here, I'm really scared!"

"How do you think I feel?" the clown says, "I have to walk out of here alone."

Annnnd that's the only joke my husband has told me in ten years that I can repeat. Now who wants to hear the one about the three-armed narcoleptic stripper who SQUEAK! SQUEAK! SQUEAK!