Thessalonica

That got a loud laugh. Every tax collector George had ever known would have worshiped a god like that. He watched the men in the taverns looking around at one another. Half of them would have worshiped a god like that, too. Enough people owed George money that he might have been tempted into a brief bit of fiscal paganism himself.

“That same god went down into the Jews’ quarter,” John added. “They told him to come back once he had some experience.” No one was safe from John. That was a lot of what made him funny. It was also what made the people whose vanity he flicked hate him.

A barmaid carrying a wooden tray filled with empty mugs stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot. She squealed and managed to stay upright, but several of the mugs flew off the tray. Being the cheapest of cheap crockery, they shattered.

“Pick up the pieces, Verina,” Paul said wearily when the noise stopped. “That’ll come out of your pay, you know.”

“What a kind and generous host we have,” John exclaimed--not sarcasm, as George first thought, but the lead-in to a joke, for the comic continued, “Puts me in mind of the two fellows who owned a slave in common. One day one of them came into their shop and found the other one whacking the slave with a stick. “What are you doing? he asked his partner. And the other fellow told him, ‘I’m beating my half.’ “

As Verina swept up the shards of the broken mugs, John said, “Like I told you, Paul’s a good fellow. Instead of taking it out of Verina s pay, he could have taken it out some other way.” He leered at the barmaid. The largely male crowd whooped. Verina looked ready to throw the pieces of crockery at him. Again, though, he’d only used the situation to help set up a story: “I remember the poor fool who was talking with a good-looking woman, and he said to her, ‘I wonder whether you or my wife tastes better.’” He leered again, and ran his tongue lewdly over his lips. “And the woman said, “Why don’t you ask my husband? He’s tasted us both.’”

He got his laugh, but George, listening to it, thought it had a certain nervous undertone. Not everyone had as much confidence in his wife as he did with Irene, and everyone there, no doubt, had been devastated by an unexpected answer at one time or another, even if not by that particular unexpected answer. When John’s jokes worked well, they touched a central core of humanity all his listeners shared.

“Then,” said the comic, “there was the fellow who went to Maurice and wanted to be named Augustal prefect of Egypt. ‘I already have one,’ Maurice told him. ‘Well, all right, you’re the Emperor--make me governor of Thrace,’ the man said. And Maurice answered, ‘I can’t do that, either--I like the job the man there now is doing.’ And the fellow said, ‘In that case, give me twenty solidi!’ So Maurice did. As the fellow was walking out of the palace with his gold pieces, his friend asked, ‘Aren’t you disappointed you got so little?’ And the fellow said, ‘Are you crazy? I never would have got this much if I hadn’t asked for all the other stuff.’ “

That got a laugh, too, both for the sake of the joke and, again, for the obvious truth it contained: Maurice, among the most parsimonious Roman Emperors of all time, never parted with a copper if he could help it.

John got down from the platform, went over to the bar, and spoke to Paul in a loud, wheedling voice: “How about giving me half an interest in this tavern, my good and wise friend?”

“What?” Paul jerked as if a wasp had stung him. “Are you out of your mind, John? Go away.”

“Well, if you won’t do that, how about letting me have all the roast pork I can eat for the next year?” John asked.

“Are you crazy?” said the taverner, who obviously hadn’t been paying attention to the routine. “Go back there and be funny.”

“Give me a mug of wine, then.”

Paul dipped it out for him. “There. Go on, now.”

John turned to the crowd. “You see?” he said with an enormous grin. People laughed and cheered as he finally went back to the platform, and Paul never did figure out where the joke lay. John knocked back the wine in one long draught, then ruefully shook his head. “ ‘Go back there and be funny,’ the man says. I’ll tell you people what’s funny. That’s funny. Our beloved host thinks he can tell somebody to be funny and have it happen, just like that.”

“You’d better be funny,” said Paul, who was listening now.

John ignored him. Now the comic’s face bore a wistful expression: maybe a true one, maybe only a trick of the light. “I wish it were that easy. I wish you could walk into a shop and say, ‘I’d like a pound of funny, please,’ and put it in a sack and take it home with you. Wouldn’t that be fine, if you could buy funny the way you buy a loaf of bread from Justin the baker or a pair of shoes from George here?”

Now George jumped. John hadn’t been in the habit of including him in his routines, and he would have been as well pleased had his friend left him out of this one, too.