The title says it all. I do not find jokes humorous if they are not followed by an article that repeats the joke in progressively weaker forms for several paragraphs. My friends find this peculiar. “Just laugh at the joke,” they say, as if I could appreciate humor in its raw and undiluted form. When someone delivers a punchline, my immediate response is to ask: “But where is the accompanying thought piece that explains why this is funny while simultaneously draining it of all comedic value?”

That is, I need the joke as well as a written piece that exhausts the same material to the point where it is entirely devoid of humor. Without this requisite follow-up, I find myself unable to fully engage with any joke, as I require it to be stretched into something that is substantially less funny. I read any joke and spend the entire time thinking about how it can be reformatted into a headline, and only then can I even consider the possibility of opening my mouth to laugh. So that it’s clear, I’ll say again: I must see the same comedic premise disassembled into its component parts and then diluted as it is restated over and over again, until it becomes clear that the very act of extending the joke has undermined what made it appealing in the first place.