All the way through reading it I could tell it was a Russian story. Wow if it doesn't have a Russian character all over it. Even that it has such a long long story that gets all the more absurd, and yet you keep reading only to find that there is no punchline at all. Not now and not forever.

It reminds me of an exchange student who lived with my family. For some reason she could not understand the fact that jokes which play on language do not translate properly and aren't funny on the other side.

She was a very beautiful girl, she had brown shoulder-length hair, a clear face, red cheeks, a nose that wrinkled when she giggled, narrow waist, wide hips and the set of knockers that when looking at them you produce the erection.

She told stories about hedgehogs and how they kiss in the forest. She told stories about actors at the little theatre, meaning that it was the Bolshoi, which actually means big so she calls it little as a joke. She said that performers tell eachother to go to the devil instead of break a leg.

My favorite story though, was about a fisherman. By favorite I mean that I never got what was funny, despite her assurance that it really really was a hilarious story and I must be the stupidest in the world. The only thing funny about it to me was that she would describe every element in great detail, so it took forever to tell the story, and it was hardly worth the wait except for the fact that I could enjoy looking at that beautiful set of parts which was so well put together for as long as it took to tell the story. For this reason I didn't mind one bit all the added details which were really completely superfluous to the story.

This is the story then, without all the embellishments I previously described, but with an imitation of the way in which she would speak it.

A fisherman sat at the bank of Neva river. After an hour he still didn't catch anything. After two hours still there was nothing found in his basket. After three hours he was getting very hungry and he thought he should leave if he didn't have the reba (fish) within a very short time. After fours hours his stomach rumbled, and it was so loud that all the birds flew from their trees and they were very upset and made great commotion squeeking, no, that's for the mouse, squawking I mean, and chirping. Then he saw a very beautiful woman walking past, and he was looking at her very hard like staring. While he was looking at her a huge fish grabbed his hook, and he was such startled that he dropped his bottle of vodka in the water and the fish got away.

She said it was a joke that she and her friends at gymnasium started, and that it was very funny if you are smart enough to know. But evidently the humor must come from wordplay, which she said was very common in Russian jokes, and also that an absent punchline after a long build up was a common element in Russian humor. So I told her it must be the fault of the communists, Lenin must have made humor illegal directly after the revolution, because her jokes were not funny in any way whatsoever. In response she bent over and revealed that she wasn't wearing any panties, only a bathrobe, which caused me to develop the erection, but she was only 16 and I was 18 so I never did touch her. I suppose she probably thought I was a homosexual.

THE END