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Buddy | Aug 18 2004

I’m in the army and a robot is my best buddy. This is great, I guess, except yesterday I had to watch my buddy’s head get blown off. We were crawling through a ditch on our bellies when there was this sudden flash of light and ka-boo, no robot head. I was grief-stricken because I loved that robot and because this was supposed to be a training session; nobody said anything about explosions and blown-up heads. Holding back tears, I went up to Sarge and said, “Sarge, they blew the head off my best buddy.” Sarge wasn’t sympathetic at all and told me to shake it off—best buddies got their heads blown off all the time, he said, and in fact he’s lost a dozen best buddies this way. Typical Sarge.

The next morning, while I’m cleaning my gun and thinking about that blown-up head, Sarge introduces me to my new best buddy. This one looks exactly like the last one, and really is like the last one, except it turns out that he can’t remember anything I told the last one. Evidently those conversations got blown up with his head.

The new one knows all the jokes told by the last one, and he tells them the exact same way. These are all light bulb jokes. For example:

Question: How many radical lesbian feminist robot soldiers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: That’s not funny.

All his jokes are about robot soldiers. I change them in my head to be about real people, because I find the robot soldiers part distracting. I don’t tell my new buddy this because hey, why risk offending him? If he tells a joke and I laugh, that’s what matters, not what I’m laughing at.