"The Three Infernal Jokes" (1915)

Then there is Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, who specialized in a kind of fantasy all his own. Where others waxed on at length the Irish nobleman tended to keep it short. I might prefer Saki, roughly his Scottish contemporary, but both were quite good working in tight spaces, lathering up with absurdity and the snap of the cruel. Lord Dunsany errs more often toward the plain fantastic—many of his stories are strewn with words and proper nouns he made up. This story is almost conventional for Lord Dunsany, a surprising and weird variation on the crossroads encounter with Old Scratch. At a bar they all frequent, a man declares to a group of fellow salesmen that one woman to him is as ugly as another. This is in the context of the salesmen boasting of their virtues. That is his. Later, another man—a supernatural being of some kind who places phone calls to Hell—expresses his admiration for the virtue and his desire to purchase it. His offer is three jokes that will make all who hear the first man tell them die of laughter. The jokes aren't actually very funny, as the first man notices, but the other says that's no matter. It's the spells they carry that count. Some time later, as a matter of conducting his own line of work as an encyclopedia salesman, the first man is giving a dinner for 20 at his club and decides to try one of his jokes there to see what happens. Suddenly the story plunges crosswise at once of urbane James Thurber and ingrown Franz Kafka, much of the mood perhaps due to the strange spell of infectious laughter, with a splash of unhinged suspense:

They laughed. One man accidentally inhaled his cigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and tittered behind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quite clearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously in trying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. The joke had succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say little deprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did not stop and the waiters would not be silent. He waited, and waited wondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, and the waiters as loud as any. It had gone on for three or four minutes when the frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: it was forced laughter! However could anything have induced him to tell so foolish a joke? He saw its absurdity in revulsion; and the more he thought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too, the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brother touts again. And still the laughter went roaring and choking on. He was very angry. There was not much use in having a friend, he thought, if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. And then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away, and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and slunk from the room and slipped away from the club. Poor man, he scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared at you; and the headlines said: – Twenty-Two Dead Men at a Club.

It's sublime in its way, and the story is not finished yet. It goes on from there as he is arrested and charged with mass slaying. And he still has a third joke to tell.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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