Dogs Don't Tell Jokes

HOLES,
Louis Sachar

STANLEY YELNATS’ SURVIVAL GUIDE
TO CAMP GREEN LAKE,
Louis Sachar

THE BOY WHO LOST HIS FACE,
Louis Sachar

THERE’S A BOY IN THE GIRLS’ BATHROOM
Louis Sachar

SPRING-HEELED JACK,
Philip Pullman

DONUTHEAD,
Sue Stauffacher

TROUT AND ME,
Susan Shreve

CRASH,
Jerry Spinelli

REMOTE MAN,
Elizabeth Honey

This story begins with a smile.

It was a stupid-looking smile on a rather stupid-looking face. Maybe it was the smile that made the face look stupid. Or maybe it was the face that made the smile look stupid. It was difficult to tell because the two were rarely apart.

It was the smile on the face of Gary Boone.

He was in the seventh grade at Floyd Hicks Junior High School. Just about everybody there thought he was a goon. They called him Goon right to his smiling face.

“You’re an idiot, Goon, you know that?” Paul Wattenburg said to him one morning.

“No, as a matter of fact I didn’t,” Goon said, then laughed.

He called himself Goon too. On the first day of school, his math teacher, Miss Langley, asked him his name and he said, “Goon.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Langley.

“See, my name’s Gary Boone,” Gary explained, “so you take the
G
from Gary and the ‘oon’ from Boone, and you put them together and get ‘Goon.’ Ha. Ha.”

Miss Langley went on to something else.

Last year at the end of sixth grade, Gary was voted Class Clown. He took it as a great compliment. He wanted to be a stand-up comic when he grew up. “Or a sit-down comic,” he would sometimes say, “if my legs get tired.”

Unfortunately, however, nobody who voted for him meant it as a compliment. They never laughed at his jokes. He was simply the obvious choice.

Gary often daydreamed about being on a late-night talk show, sitting next to beautiful starlets and other celebrities, cracking jokes. Naturally, all the starlets would fall in love with him because he was so funny.

Sometimes Miss Langley would be up on stage with him.…

“You were his seventh-grade teacher, weren’t you?” asks David Letterman
.

“That’s right,” says Miss Langley. “But even then I knew he’d grow up to be a famous comedian. Of course, as a teacher, I never would let myself laugh at his jokes. I bit the insides of my cheeks raw to keep from laughing. He was so funny. I only wished I was fifteen years younger.
”

Miss Langley happened to be one of the most beautiful teachers ever to teach seventh-grade math. At night when Gary dreamed about her, he called her Miss Longlegs.

He dreamed about her surprisingly often—at least once a week.

“Hey, Goon!” said Matt Hughes. “Has anybody ever told you you’re an idiot?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Gary. “Paul mentioned it this morning. Ha. Ha.”

Gary wrote a story called “The Boy Who Ate Fire” for English class.

Mrs. Carlisle was his English teacher. Someone in the class had asked how many pages the story had to be. “Whatever’s appropriate,” Mrs. Carlisle had answered.

That was her big mistake.

Mrs. Carlisle refused to accept the story. “It’s not a story,” she said. “It’s only one sentence.”

“Two,” corrected Gary.

She told him he had to rewrite the story, and that it had to be at least five pages. She said it was a good title, but it doesn’t tell what happens.

“But that’s what happens when you eat fire,” said Gary. “You die.”

It was supposed to be a joke.

Mrs. Carlisle didn’t laugh.

Someday, Gary thought, his story would be published. It would be a big thick book and cost $19.95.
The Boy Who Ate Fire
by Gary W Boone. Then you’d open it up and it would just have two sentences, followed by three hundred blank pages. It would be hilarious. Millions of people would buy it and put it on their coffee tables. He’d be rich.

After English, Gary headed to math class. He’d been in junior high for almost a month, but he still found it muddling to have to change classrooms every period. At night he sometimes dreamed he couldn’t remember his schedule. He also dreamed they changed his schedule without telling him.

They changed his locker combination in his dreams too. Once, he dreamed that for some odd reason he had taken off his clothes in the hallway and locked them in his locker because he thought it was his gym locker—although that didn’t exactly make sense either. He quickly realized his mistake, standing there in the hallway in his underwear—as Miss Longlegs, wearing cowboy boots and holding an umbrella over her head, walked toward him—but he couldn’t get his locker open. In fact, he couldn’t remember which locker was his.

In real life, however, he had no problem with his locker, or in finding his way from class to class. But having to rush around changing classes all the time, he felt like he was missing something; like there was something happening that everybody in the school knew about—except him. And there was nobody he could ask. And even if there was somebody to ask, he didn’t know the question.

“Gary, why didn’t you do the homework?” Miss Langley asked him after class.

He was standing by her desk, wondering if she owned a pair of cowboy boots. “I didn’t know about it,” he said.

“You didn’t know about it? How could you not know about it?”

He shrugged. “There are a lot of things I don’t know about. In fact, there are probably more things I don’t know about than I do know about.” He laughed.

Miss Langley stared at him. “It was on the board,” she said slowly and distinctly, like she was talking to an idiot.

“Where?”

“Where it always is,” said Miss Langley. “In the box in the upper right-hand corner.”

Gary looked at the blackboard. There was a section blocked off which contained the day’s homework assignment.

“I’ve put the homework there every day since the first day of school,” said Miss Langley. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

He didn’t tell her.

Miss Langley stared at him in disbelief. “Have your eyes ever been checked?” she asked.

“No,” said Gary. “They’ve always been brown.”

In one of his more bizarre daydreams Gary imagined himself as some kind of superhero
who caught criminals by telling them jokes. The crooks would laugh so hard they’d fall down.

SUPERGOON CATCHES BANK ROBBERS!
the headline proclaims. The newspaper has a picture of the two masked men laughing hysterically on the sidewalk, while Gary is standing over them, telling one joke after another
.