Facetious

Joking (often inapproptiately); humorous (adj.)

When Christmas came around at the college radio station, the managers of the station shoved a plastic bag from a liquor store in front of me and told me to take a piece of paper out of it. Secret Santa, they said. I looked up at these people who didn't understand my music and were not my friends, and I took out a scrap of an old memo with "Drew Nitsky" scribbled on it. Drew was the head of the hip-hop department. I didn't know him at all, except for the fact that he was white and from Long Island and walked around wearing the hood of a hooded sweatshirt over his head, his pants sagging down from his hips, and wore unlaced designer sneakers in the summer and unlaced designer boots in the winter. I had to buy this person a gift. The radio people said, "Make it funny. Don't spend too much."

I had two ideas about what to get Drew Nitsky, both of them facetious and bookish:

My first idea was to give him an old copy of Langston Hughes' The Ways of White Folks, a collection of short stories whose main theme is white culture's belittlement of black culture through paternal admiration for its "wild" and "magical" art. It would be a "funny uh-oh" kind of joke.

My second idea was to give him a copy of Milan Kundera's The Joke. That, I thought, would tell itself.

They had the Christmas party in the student center. All the DJ's and department chairs came and ate bad frosted cookies, the ones you eat because you've eaten them every Christmas and no matter how stale or pointlessly sweet they are you continue to eat them. The time came for gift-giving. My name and Drew's were called somewhere in the middle of what seemed like a list of four-hundred names.
"Dave had Drew, what'd ya get him Dave?" asked one of the managers, trying to manufacture comedy.
No one laughed.
I walked over to Drew and gave him a book wrapped in comic strips from an old newspaper. Charlie Browns and Family Circuses and Garfields. He ripped it open, hooded head hanging over the gift. He examined the used copy of Kundera's first novel and he looked up at me.
"Oh," he said, "thanks."
"What is it?" someone from Metal Rock asked.
"A book. It's called The Joke," Nitsky said.
Silence.
"They told me it was supposed to be funny," I said to everyone.