The First Joke

    It happened early one morning, just before sunrise, underneath a purple sky―a sky far more transparent than the one above us today or tomorrow or ever again. Globs of stars stretched across the crowded backdrop, mixing with swirling galaxies and creeping nebulae. The horizon glowed blue in anticipation of the breaking dawn.  

    Grugg and Doug were crouched in the wet grass, stalking a fanged giraffe. Spears in hand, they crept through the prairie, not blinking, not breathing. The giraffe would chomp and chomp, and whenever its head shot up to attention, the two mans would halt dead. Stillness would follow. Then the animal would chomp, then chomp again, and it would lower its head, and the mans would step closer, then closer.

    Until something gurgled and groaned―something that sounded like a toad mammoth―and the prey vanished into the grass like a fish into the sea. The noise had come from Doug's stomach; once again, hunger had thwarted its own efforts. Days it had been since either man had eaten, as was true of the rest of their clan. It would not be long before someone died, and not long after that before the rest of them followed.

    Grugg smacked his spear against the back of Doug's head, then gestured with the tip towards where the giraffe had gone. Go, his face said, and he turned on his knuckles to find new prey somewhere else.

    Any other day, Doug would have pursued. But something about this particular morning gave him pause. A comforting breeze combed through his locks of matted hair and caressed his pronounced cheeks. The sky warmed, the sunrise glistened off the dew, and the dazzling reflections below joined with the fading stars above, erasing the boundaries between here and there. All of these sensations triggered in his brain a chain reaction that no living creature in the history of history had ever experienced.

    Understandably, Doug had to sit down.

    Grugg, hearing the thump as Doug's leathery buttocks hit the dirt, returned to his companion. He confronted him. Go, he indicated again. GO!

    Doug huffed, a cloud of dust spewing off his furry chest.

    No.

    Grugg was confused. He stamped his fists and barked. He circled the sitting man. He felt Doug's forehead and probed inside his mouth with his sooty fingers. He checked under his armpits for the Crazy Pink; he checked up his nose for the Kill Kill Worm. When he found nothing, he did not know what else to do other than to look Doug in the eye and plead: What wrong?

    With open arms, Doug offered the world around them. Everything, he implied.

    Startled, Grugg hunched as low as he could, his belly brushing the ground, his elbows and knees pointed out like a monkey spider. He scanned around for danger, and when he found none, he shook with frustration. He yelled to the sky and flung his arms around. He gestured to Doug, then to the giraffe (whose unfortunate neck was now towering in plain sight), then back to Doug, then back to the giraffe, then he yelled again. Why not get giraffe? He RIGHT there!

    Doug raised his eyebrows and his palms. He shook his head. Why? he asked. What point?

    For Grugg, there was no need to think about that question. He poked his spear into Doug's concave stomach, then he stuck out his tongue and rolled back his eyes. You hungry. No giraffe, you die. That why. He replicated Doug's earlier sign of offering the world. That why everything!

    Doug shook his head and decided to give his friend an example. Leaving behind his spear, he stood up and dashed back to the cave on the far side of the prairie. Curious, Grugg followed. Inside the rocky shelter were those of their tribe too young or old or sickly to venture outdoors. The cave dwellers were excited to see the two hunters return so early, but when they didn't see any carcasses dragging behind, they hung their heads. Doug ignored them and headed straight for Mama Old, who had seen more winters than anyone alive.

    The crone looked asleep. Putting his ear against her chest, Doug listened. Then he pounded his fist against her sternum. Her body spasmed with each hit, but she did not wake until the fourth blow, which she did with a long gasp, eyes bulging. Color returned to her face. She grasped around the floor for food or water. Doug placed some berries in her fingers, and she gobbled them up and promptly collapsed back into sleep.

    Doug faced Grugg expectedly, as if Mama Old's death and revival should explain his behavior. But Grugg did not understand the point of this nonsense. This was not the first time Mama Old had died. Why should he be so impressed?

    In a flurry of hand motions and twisted postures and ugly faces, Doug worked up a sweat weaving together a full narrative: SHE eat! She always eat and drink and escape Teeth and Claws. But she still die. No matter what, she still die and one day she will not wake up, like Papa Old. We will too. All of us. Our children, their children. We all be hungry. We all be thirsty. We all suffer and be scared and grow old and weak, and after that, we will die. Out of breath, Doug shrugged. So, why bother? He shrugged again. What for?

    It took a minute, but Grugg was soon presented with the vision that Doug had seen out in the grassland. Fireworks exploded behind his eyes. Weak in the knees, he sat down.

    This was a troublesome realization, and it spread through the tribe like a plague. When men and women returned to the cave that evening from their hunts and their gatherings (some successful, some not), they were greeted with quiet looks and lost expressions. One by one, the tribe members were taught how to see the world as a pointless series of causes and effects, a world riddled by pain without reward, a life that had been a farce.

    No one knew what to do with this new information. That night, around an indoor campfire, the adults discussed how to handle it. They argued fiercely about the best way to move forward, and by dawn the next day, the tribe had fractured three ways. This was the birth of spirituality, the world's first three examples of organized religion: the Church of Everything, the Church of Nothing, and the Church of Doug. Each group had a different solution to the What For Problem, and they went their separate ways to test out their beliefs and see just who was right.

    The first sect to go extinct was the Church of Nothing. They worshiped reality and logic, and they shunned false hope. Within a week, they all starved to death. None of them could justify eating when hunger would only return, maybe even worse than before, and none of them could see the point in growing older. To live a long life meant that you would only see that much more death and suffering and feel that much more pain and terror. Out of compassion, the adults drowned their children and buried the elderly while they slept, and those who remained alive peacefully faded into nothingness.

    The next group to perish was the Church of Everything. They embraced the idea that, no matter the evidence, everything was fine and dandy. They did not deny the voice in their hearts that told them, as it always had, that there was indeed a sweet carrot at the end of the thorny stick―that for every discouraging fact of nature, there was something unseeable that countered it all, and that death was not the bleak finality that it seemed. So confident were they in this, they stopped running from predators or worrying when their food reserves ran low. Before long, they too stopped feeding their babies, and as a tribe they all dissolved into everything.

    And then there was the Church of Doug. They did not claim to know the answer to the big What For Problem, but they did not deny that it bothered them. Like the others, they needed an answer, but until they had one, they did as they always had, hunting and gathering, eating when they were hungry and drinking when they were thirsty, hiding in the cave whenever the sky turned black and loud, crouching in the shrubs whenever they heard the roar of a tricerirabbit.

    Years passed. Old ones died and new ones took their place. But with each passing loved one and with each baby born disfigured or not at all, the What For Problem grew harder to ignore. Eventually, the tribe cornered their leader (Doug, if you hadn't guessed) and demanded an answer to the great question once and for all. If he couldn't come up with one, they were going to find their answer in the old beliefs of Nothing and Everything. Some had already splintered from the dwindling tribe, taking up beliefs somewhere between the spectrum of Nothing and Everything, as ones always would for thousands of generations to come.

    So Doug, old and feeble but still sharp in mind, told his followers that he would retire to the deepest, darkest part of the cave and not come back up until he had an answer. If he was not back by the next full moon, they should count him either dead or defeated, and to live their lives however they chose.

    He did this, and two weeks later, when his tribe had assumed the worst, he shuffled back up and into the light of the full moon. He was as thin as a skeleton and as tired as the dead, but his eyes sparkled with life.

    His people tugged at his loin cloth and begged for the answer. They couldn't take one more second of not knowing! But he did not give them what they sought, not immediately. He climbed on top of a rock, joints popping, muscles trembling. The crowd was ravenous, but he did not move to speak until every one of them had quieted down. Once he had their attention, he delivered the results of his meditative journey, in the crude language his daughter had invented some years earlier:

    "Why Doug fall down?" he asked, grinning. The crowd did not understand, so he asked again. "Why. Doug. Fall. Down?"

    Some pointed out that Doug had not fallen down, that he was standing right there. Others wanted to know when it was he had fallen down so they might remember why. A few thought he was talking about some other Doug; maybe that hairy prick who never shared the hot springs.

    He closed his eyes and waved his hand. He rethought his words and said: "Me fall down. Want know why?"

    They did. They begged him for an answer. The begged him for The Answer. "Why?" they all pleaded. "Why you fall down?"

    "Because," he said. "Me no good at falling up."

    He laughed. It was a childish noise, one used by sparring youngsters to assure others that there was no danger in their play, just fun. Doug laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks, and once he had calmed down, he lowered himself from the rock.

    His tribe was dumbfounded. Some grew angry and stormed around the cave flipping over rocks and flinging straw into the air. Some gathered their children on their backs and readied to leave.

    But someone else laughed. It was Deb, the second of Doug's eight wives. She joined her husband, and they supported eachother's weight as they doubled over in mirth. Dob, Deb's sister, was the next to laugh, followed by Dub, Dib, and Dab. The children joined in, then the elderly, and then the sick.

    Those who did not laugh called it madness. To some, it was no different than the Church of Everything and their way of turning their back on the morbid truths of life. To others, it was identical to the Church of Nothing and their way of accepting the pointlessness of the universe.

    "It both," Doug admitted to those who were abandoning him. "Yes, me go in cave, and me no find answer to question. Me try. Me fail. And me think about this. Me think, 'We all try. We all fail.' Me remember how Everythingers look away from dark, and they fail. Me remember how Nothingers look away from light, and they fail too. So, I think, what if both wrong? But this no seem right either.

    "So, I think, what if both right? What if Nothingners right? What if universe nothing but mean and hurtful. And what if Everythingers right, too? What if everything okay? More me think about this, more both seem right. More me think, more silly everything seem. And more silly everything seem, more silly seem right.

    "Please, go if wish. Come back if want. Just know: succeed mean try, and try mean fail. This silly, but this life. This confusing, but this life. Life silly. Life is try when know we fail. Please, whatever do, no stop trying. No ignore darkness in world, and no ignore light inside. When see dark, face it. Enter it like Nothingners did, but take with you Everythinger's light.

    "When me say me no good at falling up, me call this 'joke'. Joke remind that life silly; life is try no matter what. Joke remind that all fail. Together. To be alive is to be together, to fail together, and to try together. No agree?"

    By this point, the dissenters had all left the cave. Doug laughed. He had failed at both keeping his tribe whole and at solving life's greatest question. But he tried, and one week later, he fell dead of a stroke. His wives buried him in the prairie at sunrise.