ONE EVENING HIS father told a funny story about a friend who had tried and couldn’t learn to play the kazoo. His father wasn’t often funny and when requested would retell this story. Occasionally his father took him to lunch with business acquaintances; his father laughed more among them than at home. When he told his mother a joke she would say it was funny but not laugh. It was easy to get a smile from her because she was pleased with him; from his father it was easy to get a laugh because his father was surprised when he did or said something amusing. In school it was satisfying to make another student laugh so that the student would be reprimanded by the teacher; this could be done by a well-timed comment or grimace, or by goosing a student standing to recite. He had a repertory of jokes and was asked to tell them over and over. The favorite concerned an American visitor to England to whom it was explained that in England a man sitting in the first row of a theater balcony was permitted to piss into the orchestra; when the American did this a voice from below was heard: “Would you mind wobbling it a bit? I’m getting it all, you know.” He could make friends laugh without jokes: by tensing his body and simulating a fit; by putting a lit cigarette into his ear and exhaling smoke he had held in his mouth; if a girl was present, by opening his fly and pulling out a shirttail. Once when eating a ham sandwich in a cafeteria with his friend Alec he pressed the far side of the sandwich as he was about to bite the near side. The near side opened like a mouth. He closed his mouth, the sandwich closed. He continued the routine, and people laughed for tables around. Once when he was clowning among friends a newcomer to the neighborhood called him a fool; later the death of the boy in the war made sense to him. When he was courting the girl he would marry he could make her and her sisters laugh at will and would amuse them for hours in the kitchen after their parents had gone to bed. When he was first married he continued to be able to make his wife laugh, with a funny face, an obscene gesture, putting on a piece of her clothing; after their first child was born, however, laughs were harder to get; finally they came only by chance. When his children were babies he could make them laugh by suddenly disappearing, then reappearing. When they could talk he would challenge one of them to keep a straight face after he had said a special word. Often the child would laugh waiting for the word. The word or phrase that never failed was belly button; part of the game would be for the child to guess whether he would say belly button or not. Once when he was playing the game with the younger child the older, who had become resistant to it, challenged him to keep a straight face for her word. The word was poppycock, which he laughed at out of politeness but which shocked him. Once when his wife caught him surreptitiously talking with a girl on the phone and laughing she said, “What kind of a marriage is this where I get all your tears and someone else gets all your laughter?”; and when she discovered that he was sleeping with another woman she said, “I don’t mind the sex you two have together, I mind the laughing.” Years later, after he had fallen in love and he and the woman were laughing at a bar while waiting for curtain time a drunk told them it would never work, they were having too much fun. He could not make this woman laugh when he wanted to; when he told her a joke she grunted. Sometimes she would become amused at her own thoughts and laugh for a long time without telling him what was funny. It seems to him that people do not laugh so much as they used to. Occasionally when he and friends smoke marijuana together they laugh like children. After his mother becomes senile he will be able to make her laugh by entering into her confusion. For instance, she will say, “I saw two dogs in the doorway today,” an impossibility. He will ask, “A light one and a dark one?” “I think so,” she will say. “Were their names…?” and he will say the names of his ex-wife and his sister-in-law. His mother will look wary for a few seconds, then get the joke and laugh. As he becomes older he will think that fewer things are funny to him because he understands more things.