Letter #207: Orange You Glad It's Lent?

An Uncomfortable Season

Spench.

As you know, there’s a joke that has puzzled me for years. I think it’s the funniest joke I’ve ever heard. What puzzles me is that only a very few other people find it funny. Here it is:

A man walks into a bar. He has an orange for a head. The bartender pours him a drink and says: “So—you want to tell me about it?”

“Well, I was walking on the beach,” says the man with an orange for a head. “I found an old lamp in the sand and took it home. When I polished the lamp, a genie came out and offered me three wishes in return for setting him free. Thinking it was some sort of trick, I offhandedly wished for a million dollars. Instantly, the doorbell rang. A man had arrived to tell me I’d won a mail-order sweepstakes for exactly a million dollars.

Excited, I returned to the genie. I wished I could have sex with a different supermodel every month for a year. Sure enough, the first day of each month, a beautiful woman arrived at my door, eager to please.

So I went back to the genie a third time,” says the man with an orange for a head, “and I think this may be where I made my mistake.”

“What did you do?” asks the bartender.

“I wished to have an orange for a head.”

Even writing it makes me laugh. And the mystery of why so few people get it still intrigues me. About thirteen years ago, I wrote an article about it for City Journal. I theorized that the joke mostly appealed to fiction writers because it illustrated humanity’s irrational self-destructiveness and demonstrated how that made storytelling a vitally unpredictable art.

But about three years ago, something more occurred to me. You can’t really get the joke if you don’t understand: all three of the man’s wishes — money, meaningless sex, an orange-head — they’re all the same wish. The punchline is that, with the orange-head wish, the true nature of the other wishes is suddenly revealed.

I don’t always give something up for Lent. But every time I have, it was something I enjoyed — and I never did it again. That is, I subtracted something from my life that gave me pleasure and discovered my life improved so much that I did not want that pleasure back.

We do not do the good we want and we wish for the orange-head we don’t want. Somewhere along the line, our spirit and flesh came to be at odds with one another in a way no other creature on earth experiences. Those who think religion is a comfortable falsehood, answer me this. Who is this "I" that knows I am an enemy to myself? And what is it that calls me to the very uncomfortable Lenten rigor that strives to triumph over a nemesis that wears my face?

Asking for a friend.

Love, Dad