The Forbidden Joke

 The city streets were clean. Cleaner than what seemed imaginable in such a busy city. It's almost as if the asphalt and sidewalks were pressure washed every night. No signs of potholes or weeds ripping up cracks in the sidewalk. The cleanliness of the city also matched the air quality. You felt like you could breathe. No appearance of annoying fog or smoky clouds. 

Everyone in the city were peaceful. They took time to say hello and catch up with each other even if they only saw them the other day. There was a sense of gleeful eeriness. People walking or taking rides to their jobs with big smiles on their faces. Everyone seemed dressed up. There were no half baked hungover outfits in a sea of tightly cleaned and tailored threads. Traffic noise was minimal and the elevated train that ran through the main street was efficient and brightly futuristic. It was bought by the No Pollution Solution. 

This peaceful coexistence didn't quite happen over night. There were twists in tangles in getting such a healthy and vibrant city. Everything comes with a cost and benefit at that. There were many people that didn't want such a conformingly beautiful city to happen. It was more expensive to live in, but a level of tribal existence that appeared to make all the citizens happy. Happy with a sense of purpose to he bigger picture even if it was only delegated within the walls and confines of the city itself. The individual almost seemed secondarily to the collective. History would have some things to say about this concept. Mostly not nice words at that. 

People knew the rules and social norms. They knew what to do and most importantly what not to do. Any step out of line would resonate across the city as if it was a gossipy Amish community. Words traveled fast and the walls were certainly paper thin with a wavering base. The outsiders tended to be dealt with on a rehabilitation bent basis unless the repeat offenders were not getting "the bigger picture". The repeat offenders tended to be exiled or put on a strict probation where they were almost invisible in a society of cooperative and joyful looking people. At first when you messed up, they were nice, then that niceness tended to be less useful and efficient. The city was fascinated with the idea of efficiency. It was one of the main drivers of progress within the clean and austere landscape. There was a sense of strict and simple design that sit within every other building like a puzzle or game of Tetris. Everything was methodical and planned. Spontaneity was discouraged, but not actively enforced against.  

Order was key. Keeping order meant that there was a keeping of a type of collective sanity and sense of civility. Their belief was that keeping order and sticking to it can only bring more peace and happiness to the masses. It took everyone simply doing their parts. Staying in line was a virtue. Obedience was a major driver to an ideological sense of peaceful coexistence. However smug it came out to be. 

There were things that were off limits and things that were "really off limits". Like record scratch enter the bar in the wrong type of neighborhood off limits. To say that these totally off limits things were illegal would be an understatement. The punishment or rehabilitation was way more severe than the minor offenses. One of the most offensive things was the Forbidden Joke. Telling this joke or even alluding to this forbidden joke was cause for expulsion from the city. Most of the time with no guarantee of re-entry. The origins of this Forbidden Joke are more complex than we may think, but more mysterious than what we would like. 

The tale of the Forbidden Joke goes way back to before the completion of the city. It is however intrinsically intertwined within the city's genesis. There is a reason that things become forbidden. Most of the time it is threatening to some type of established order. It could very well be destructive, but of course that mostly depends on context. The Forbidden Joke in this context was all about disorder. The laughter that would result from this joke could have the potentiality to disrupt the order and harmony of the city. After all, it had happened before. 

The Forbidden Joke became so perverted that the original joke became obscured. This was most likely by design. The mutation of the joke was a means to make the people forget it. To dissolve it into a history of nostalgic irreverence. The joke was then boiled down to its key aspects so that if you referenced it then that would be enough for people to correct themselves. And quickly at that. So the mere reference of this joke or the utterance of its content was more or less a means for disciplinary action. The core of the joke seemed to have been dismantled and not in its original funny form. After all, it was only a joke. 

There was a group of people in the past that wanted to preserve the joke. They kept a secret society and met in private. They wanted to record it and archive it. They were against the idea of censorship of almost any kind. Especially the censorship of humor. That was the more egregious offense in their eyes. The rag tag group of individuals would meet up and tell the joke as good as they could remember it. Other jokes were told that would break up the monotony and lighten up the air in the room. It was about fun and allegiance to the idea of preservation and liberation with all its bells and whistles. 

The first 20 meetings were good, but people started to suspect there was something going on. They would meet in private and switch up the location, but the tight knit surveillance of the city started to make some connections. Most of the groups members seemed to have problem with the order of the city and all its rules. They would occasionally step out of line with good reason and get dirty looks from the obedient citizens. It was in the group's nature to be rebellious, but not too rebellious. At least, not to the naked eye. Local police officers started to notice the same rebels hanging together in groups. Not all of them, but some of them in smaller groups. The more they met up, the more they enjoyed each other's company and their solidarity with the idea of preserving the Forbidden Joke. 

It was the erratic patterns that started to perk the ears of the suits in charge. Everyone in the city seemed to fit into day to day routine. There was very little deviation. Coffee shops had their regulars and the upstanding citizens rarely took different routes. This was all done with glowing smiles on the people's faces. Most people would even pick up pieces of litter with a joyful composition. And there was very little litter at that seeing how clean everything was. Most of the litter came from acts of nature such as gusts of wind and human forgetfulness. So you could see how this rebel group started to stand out like a sore thumb or swollen hand. 

The group started to get more paranoid. A few members noticed the increase of police presence as they started to meet at different locations. It felt as if they were being tracked and followed. It was the deliberate intent to shake things up that made them more and more invasive. If only they could just stick to one place and meet there all the time then they might not attract so much attention. The paranoia started to affect their judgement and sense of reality. The group meetings started to become less fun. People started to look over their shoulders. They started to meet in more secretive places until they realized that they could simply pretend to be like everyone else and fall into a normalized routine.

So they started to blend in. They acted as if they were going about their day and walked with the masses. Talked like them and walked like them. All with impeccable precision and intention. Once they started to conform, they felt the sense of paranoia leave them. They didn't feel the need to look over their shoulders anymore. The officers lost interest and went back to their less stressful routines. Many of the members became so ingrained with blending in that they forgot about the purpose of the group. Many started new lives and realized that conforming to the greater good of the city was less stressful and demanding. 

There were only a few left that would meet in the Forbidden Joke group. They met in plain sight and developed code words in order to get away with conversating in public. It took some risky attempts and some hesitant side eyes, but the dwindling members made it work. They disguised the Forbidden joke and other risky' jokes under new symbols and phrases. It was a creative and critical thinking endeavor. The fact that they could get away with it under people's noses was even more exhilarating. 

Then one day, one of the members stopped showing up. It was out of the blue. A no call no show type of scenario. The first time was odd, but could have been a mistake. It wasn't worrying until the never saw him or had any type of communication. The paranoia started to seep back in. They started to look over their shoulders and postpone meetings again. They didn't notice any odd individuals or police officers this time around. The began to lose trust in the people that they surrounded themselves with. Then the distrust of their own members started to creep in. Some of them started to suspect that one of them was a rat and reporting them to authorities to get exiled. There was rift in the group and the trust was fading. 

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More members started to disappear. The same way as the first one. There was no fair warning, but many expected others to leave seeing how their was so much division and distrust within the group. The preservation of the Forbidden Joke got tossed on the backburner. Most of the remaining members were too focused on trying to figure out where everyone went and the question on who would be next. 

Then there were three. The meetings started to skip weeks and days. They happened less frequently. The tension was rising. Rising to new levels of resentment and despair. They would yell at each other. The humor was gone. The symbolism and coding of the jokes started to fade. Most of them just wanted to blend in with society like the other members, but there was something inside of them driving them. Driving them to not conform. It wasn't just to be contrarians. There was a purpose behind it. A purpose with virtue and principle. If they were to give up now, then all of this would have been for naught. 

They gathered in a more secretive spot to talk about the future of the Forbidden Joke group. It was at night and away from the center of the city. They thought it would be safer considering that there were only three members now. Trio de Force. They tried to recreate the Forbidden Joke from how they remembered it. The memories were faded and they stumbled. They tried to warm up with other lighter jokes to get the gears going, but it appeared that the Forbidden Joke was not coalescing. They started to get conspiratorial in their theories. They started to think that this was all by design. A plot to make the people forget the Forbidden Joke. Maybe the members that disappeared or left were all just agent provocateurs to sow fear and distrust within the group. It very well could have been a manipulative tactic by the government to prevent the proliferation of the Forbidden Joke and all its harmful potential. 

The night was passing fast. The air was cold, but the breeze was exhilarating. They sat at the secret spot and just looked up at the guy. Some of the clouds blocked the stars and the light pollution was not helping either. They tried so hard to capture the essence of the joke and put it down onto paper. They knew that this was the biggest risk. They had to destroy any writings when the paranoia ramped up and members started to disappear. All that was left was the memories and they had faded. They were distracted by so many things that they lost the ability to remember the forbidden nature of the joke. That last shred of rebellious humor had faded away. They all agreed to disband the group and meld back into the general population of the city. This was it and this is what they were going to do. 

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And so it was. The Forbidden Joke Society had disbanded and the threat of the joke subsided and transmuted into the murky history of the city. It existed in various forms in the heads of the ones that treasured it even if it embodied the form of a rebellious thought. The spirit of the joke had fizzled, but it could never disappear. It was now a mutant strain. A virus that was dormant, but never not a threat. 

The domestication of edgy humor was a core tenet of the city. There was always the threat of a laughable rebellion and revolution. The writings weren't gone. They were hidden. Years after the group has disbanded, a copy of the forbidden joke showed up in a bottle by the lakeside of the city. The beautifully kept and serene body of water. A couple of kids found it and tried to read it. They were not enlightened on the history of the Forbidden Joke. It was a new and refreshing. The kids laughed. It was an innocent and liberating session of laughter. They forgot about the small turmoil of their daily lives. The idea of routine faded even for a few moments. The present moment opened up and order has subsided. The kids loved it so much that they put the joke back into the bottle and kept it. They wanted to share it. They were ignorant of the consequences of this action. 

The two young boys took it back to their homemade fort. They held onto it and invited a few of their mutual friends a few days later. Their friends were equally amused. The laughter was bigger and harder the next time around. It was an intoxicating effect. The parents heard them laughing. Their eyes lit up. The laughter of children was a joyous occasion. This was a little outside of the normal realms of child like laughter. One of the parents entered the fort to see what was going on. He saw them laying on the ground crying in blissful and rapturous humor. They started to stop when they realized an adult was present. The children felt like they were hiding something not knowing the power and consequence of the recent find. The parent inquired. One of them pulled the joke out from middle of the fort and joyfully thrusted it into the hand of the parent. He started to read and his face went cold. There was an eerie silence. 

The parent stared at the paper for a long minute. It felt like an hour to the children. They felt like they did something bad. The parent then took the page and told them that they couldn't have it. He became very authoritarian and told the boys to all go home. The fun was done. The humor was vacuumed out of the fort. They felt as if they had committed some high crime. 

As all the kids went home, each one of them were notified about the forbidden joke. Each set of parents talked to their children that night. It was a serious affair. They were told to forget what they saw and not to tell anyone else. The refusal to do this would bring about drastic consequences that would go beyond the confines of each family home. Each child was told to not see the other children that had enjoyed the joke in order to cut off any temptation to keep the joke alive. Luckily it was only for a couple weeks. 

Most of the children tried to remember the joke in their heads. Their was an occasional smug smile when the humor of the joke seeped in to their consciousness. It was joy that was then followed by a sense of guilt. They knew it was wrong to laugh or even think about the joke. Many of them didn't really know why. They just trusted their parents and feared the worst. 

When the group of kids got back together, they didn't really have much to talk about. They all wanted to talk about the Forbidden Joke, but they all felt as if they were being watched. They had to censor themselves carefully. After a few uncomfortable silences, they all went for a long walk into the city. They arrived at their favorite park and started to run around. Their minds started to clear a little even though they were saddened at the fact that none of them could ever share or even enjoy the joke. It almost felt like a joke that they couldn't even do anything about it. Some of the kids would look at each other and just smile knowing that they had the honor and the privilege to enjoy and experience the elusive Forbidden Joke. 

DG