Prologue

"Who?"
-- Lou Costello

In-between 1933 and 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Comedy Project, each in the name of lifting the nation's spirits. The NCP was a subsidiary of the WPA, initially set to be fronted by a young J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover soon found comedy elsewhere, and the NCP disappeared with nary a trace. The only clues that remained included an obscure press conference -- "Mr. President, what ever happened to that NCP thingy?" "I'm not familiar with your acronym, Mr. Jacobson. T.H.I.N.G.Y?" "Thingy wasn't the acronym, sir." -- and the lingering sense that there was another side to the Federal Writer's Project Guide to the States that didn't get the documentation it deserved.

At least, X. gets that lingering sense. And he's followed it all the way to D.C., all the way to the Senate Capital, where Senator Kirkchuckle's assistant is leading X. to a closed-door meeting with the Budgetary Committee.

X. is a young comedian from Chicago. He grew up in Chicago, went to school in Chicago, and made his home at Second City, improv Olympic, and other clubs and theaters, where often the owners were nice enough to let him watch the shows in back for free if he just told the doormen he was a comedian. He gave himself the name 'X' because he didn't want his stand-up -- which was the first thing he tried out on the Chicago nightlife -- to be personality-driven. He just wanted to tell jokes, one after the other. He did.

But he read. A lot. And that proved to be a problem. He'd start yelling at his fellow comedians because no one knew who Gregor Samsa was. They'd yell back that he was being a snoot. But it made X. wonder what information was useful where, and to whom, and how different cultural constructions reflected the range of jokes, and, therefore, cultural knowledge one was able to retain. The second point was this: he thought that language was a zero sum game. He saw language as interconnected and related, and so to ascribe morality to certain types of language -- that the language of math was boring because it was math; that anyone who used a 'big word' deserved to be mocked; that idiots deserved to be mocked because they couldn't express clear ideas -- was absurd. There was no victor in language, just a series of moving shifts, and everyone deserved to be heard, given the dignity of their language. And there was something to tying those two together: could jokes bridge the knowledge gap? The language gap? Was there some form of ideological, generational, language-based bonding that could occur over nothing but a series of jokes? About things going on in each state? Something funny for the local but still funny for the outsider?

There was much more to be said on the matter, but X.'s mission could be summed up by the first line he spoke to the committee:

"I want to make and explore comedy in all 50 states."

*

Out of habit, X. goes to decompress that evening in a local club. He walks in and hears this joke:
"You guys take the Metro here? You know that thing on the Metro, 'Report all suspicious activities?' Have you ever ridden the Orange Line? It's like a shitty, Shanty carnival ride! And there's kids puking ... We go upside down at one point ... Another guy pops up, "You got a cigarette?" then retracts into the darkness ... I was on the Orange Line one day ... Three things I want to point out. One: at the end of the car, there's a man: 75 years old, dressed like a pink dinosaur, by himself. Two was a man seated across from me screaming about Jesus Christ and calling me 'Fuckles.' Third was a man who had a houseplant hanging on the handrail, which he was eating. How the fuck do you report that? What do you say?"

The comedian says that that's his time. He gets a healthy roar and some applause, then bounds off the stage, shaking hands with the owner once again. X. keeps an eye on him as the next comedian is introduced. He's low-key. Dry.

"When Alex Trebek was single, did he leave his girlfriends with more questions than answers?"

Pause.

"How come pregnant pauses aren't nine months long?"

Another pause.

"I sleep with sports mascots because I like the encouragement. Why do you think they're so quiet? They're keeping my secrets."

An applause break.

X. orders a drink from a waitress, and as he's waiting he wonders how many people that night are going to accept his offer for a job.

II.

On the nitty-gritty horizon, though, the personal impetus behind X's jaunt was this two line exchange:

"You're too smart for your own good."
"Well, whose good is it for, then?"

And X stopped. He didn't know how to answer his own question.