Trick question: does it drive you crazy to hear a great story being mis-told?

Warren Buffett supposedly warned, “If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

I’d like to twist this probably apocryphal admonition into this: “If you don’t know someone who can’t tell a funny story right, you’re the one who can’t.”

We’ve all heard the old teacher-bashing canard, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Having spent decades in classrooms, I’ve felt both the injustice and the justice of this sentiment.

Being good at something makes you appreciate the mastery of someone else who does it well, too. And that’s good.

But the downside is that it makes you over-sensitive to the ones who aren’t.

Trick question: does it drive you crazy to hear a great story being mis-told?

Sitting white-knuckled in the passenger seat with one of my children in Dad’s Driver’s Ed sessions is the closest I can think of to suffering through a poorly-told joke.

Just as in the car, when the teller doesn’t know how to drive the humor to the punchline without running the joke off the road, it takes every ounce of self-control I can muster to keep from swearing, grabbing at the steering wheel of the performance, and blurting, “Stop, dammit! Here, let me show you how to tell this joke.”

Alert, read no further: if you don’t know what I’m talking about, odds are this is about you.

That’s okay, I’m sure you have many other talents.

In the 1890s, Mark Twain, who could nail a story with the best of them, so well in fact that I’ve always suspected he spent a lot of time in both Laredos, wrote a temptingly titled essay, “How to Tell a Story.” Sorry, it’s not a how-to guide, so don’t go looking for help before your next Toastmaster’s meeting.

Anyway, the essay is actually about how to tell a joke, not a story. No wait! It’s about how not to tell a joke.

In the piece, Mark Twain shows how telling a joke wrong can be very funny. Along the way, he gives a master class in how not to tell a joke.

For his model, he uses a James Whitcomb Riley skit that was as popular 140 years ago as, say, a Key and Peele episode was in 2014.

“The Hoosier Poet” is mostly forgotten nowadays with his passé folklore and children’s verse. Too bad he wasn’t forgotten when, for my sins, in Mrs. Barrow’s 7^th grade English class at Lamar Jr. High, I had to memorize his doggerel in dialect like this:

You better mind yer parents, an’ yer teachers fond an’ dear,

An’ churish them ‘at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,

An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,

Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out!

 I swoon to mention the public teen shaming of being required to give a ‘dramatic interpretation’ of the poem in Mrs. Weatherford’s 8^th grade speech course, the same after-lunch class where I heard a shaky-voiced Mr. Lockey announce over the school PA system that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, and we took a collective step out of the certainties of childhood and into the dark of the wicked world. I mean, we students did. I can’t vouch for how much more mature Mr. Lockey and the faculty were than we teenagers were.

Anyway, returning to the next-to-last Gilded Age, James Whitcomb Riley commanded large fees as a lecturer and after-dinner humorist by telling folksy stories and reading the poems like “Little Orphant Annie” that would traumatize me 75 years later.

At one entertainment in 1888, Sam Clemens was in the audience for Riley’s most famous routine, a 10-minute thigh-slapper called “The Old Soldier.”

Not long after, in his “How to Tell a Story,” Twain wrote that it was “one of the funniest things I’ve ever listened to.”

The key to the sketch, which otherwise could be recited uninterestingly by a robot in a minute and a half, is not the marginally funny punchline. Rather it’s that Riley tells the joke in the character and speech of a slow-witted Indiana farmer.

The humor is all in the mis-telling, and the audience laughs at the inept jokester rather than at the joke itself. That much is easy to understand.

There’s a strong whiff of smug cultural condescension in the listeners’ amusement. And by the way, that’s you and me.

It’s hard to laugh at people who are smarter, more sophisticated, better-looking, wealthier, or more articulate than you are. Which is why the contemporary equivalent of the 19^th-century American “Know Nothing Party” have such a hard time making fun of the woke élite they secretly envy and publicly despise.

So, in James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Old Soldier,” the laughable Indiana yokel says he has just heard an old joke and tries to retell it to a neighbor. The fool wades in saying he’s not sure he can remember the joke well enough to tell it but pushes on. He proves almost immediately that, indeed, he can’t.

The farmer rambles. He interrupts the joke with laughter, unnecessary details, and useless explanations.

“W’y there was a feller one time –it was durin’ the army, and this feller that I started to tell you about was in the war, and –ha! ha!—there was a big fight a’goin’on, and this feller was in the fight, and it was a big battle…”

We’ve all sat in the conversational equivalent of second-hand dope smoke with people who talk like this. Around the campfire or sitting on a barstool. Or maybe it was Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving.

James Whitcomb Riley’s incompetent joke-teller goes on to commit the unforgiveable sin of burning the punchline too early.

“And the fust thing you know along came a cannon-ball and shot his head off—ha! ha! ha! Hold on here a minute! –no, sir; I’m gitting ahead of my story; no, no; it didn’t shoot his head off—I’m gittin’ the cart before the horse there—shot his leg off; that was the way; shot his leg off.”

I know, it’s a gruesome basis for laughter, but remember: Mark Twain said it’s funny.

At this point, the thread of the story gets lost in the irrelevant issue of what the name is of a soldier who happens by the poor Civil War battlefield casualty.

“So he seen a comrade a-chargin’ by that he knowed, and he hollers to him and called him by name—I disremember now what the feller’s name was. Well, that’s got nothin’ to do with the story, anyway…”

The unnamed soldier picks up his wounded comrade and carries him on his back through the shelling to the medics in the rear. What he doesn’t realize is that as they struggle along, a second cannonball has taken the head off the poor wounded (and now dead, in case you nodded off) soldier.

The Good Samaritan soldier is still slogging along hanging on to what was left of soldier on his back.

A captain hails him to ask, “Where are you goin’ with that thing?”

Unaware of the decapitating coup de grâce, the soldier answers:

“W’y, Cap, it’s a comrade o’ mind and the pore feller has got his leg shot off, and I’m a-packin’ him back to where the doctors is. The feller would’a’ died in his tracks—er, track rather—if it hadn’t a been fer me.”

Then Cap’n growls, “You blame fool you, he’s got his head shot off.”

The soldier drops his load to the ground and takes a good look at the maimed body.

With a puzzled look on his face, he exclaims, “W’y, he told me it as his leg! Ha! ha! ha!”

Just in case there was any doubt about the comedy of the story or joke, Mark Twain explains, “at the end of the ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their faces …the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art, and only a master can compass it.”

Kinda reminds me of the inadvertent humor of idiotic courtroom depositions in election integrity cases.

Too bad Mark Twain couldn’t have clued us in on how to tell a story or a joke instead of showing how to be funny ruining one.

But it turns out that no one has ever been able to explain how to tell a story right.

As Mark Twain, who should know, says, it’s “art, and only a master can compass it.”

If you still don’t know anyone who screws up a joke, let me know. I can introduce you to a couple of them. Some of them family even.

But I love them anyway.

You, too.