Hulot

The fact that so many salesmen are good at telling jokes tells us something important about humor.

I once heard a man who was trying to sell me insurance say, "there's a one-time fee you pay annually." When I asked him to repeat what he'd just said, he did.

And a person I had the dubious pleasure of doing business with on an almost daily basis said to me, upon being asked to define his business goal, "financial independance at any price."

A friend pours his heart about to me about his bad marriage, then says, "but maybe this is as good as it gets."

I know a man who has a joke for every subject. If you're drinking a can of coke, he'll tell you at least 3 can-of-coke jokes; if you're talking about Finland, he'll tell you a joke about reindeer; if you mention sex, he has an almost infinite supply of jokes, one funnier than the one before. There's not a subject or an object he doesn't have a joke for, but without his jokes he's the least funny man in the universe.

The best humor often occurs spontaneously, as in the films of Jacques Tati which were carefully choreographed so as to appear spontaneous.