2014-10-10
Explanation
The Joke
A child goes trick-or-treating at an elderly woman's door. Instead of saying "Trick or treat!" the child launches into an existential monologue: "I'm an eight year old boy. When I read history books about your time, they will not contain you. Nor will their descriptions accurately portray your sense of that time in your life." He continues: "Oh, I'll learn a thing or two about the tenants of leaders you didn't vote for, and I'll remember them for exams. But all the smells and the tastes, and the place-feelings that weave the texture of your sense of self will be lost and unrecognizable."
The child then declares: "The future is a foreign country, ma'am, and you aren't welcome there." The horrified woman asks him to please just dress as a ghost or a devil or something. The child delivers one final blow: "Oh, that reminds me. There is no afterlife."
The Humor
The humor is built on the absurd contrast between the innocence of Halloween trick-or-treating and the devastating existential content of the child's speech. Instead of wearing a costume to scare people, this child's "trick" is confronting an elderly woman with the terrifying reality that her entire lived experience will be forgotten by history. The line "The future is a foreign country, ma'am, and you aren't welcome there" is an extraordinarily dark thing for an eight-year-old to say, essentially telling her she will die and be forgotten. When the flustered woman asks him to just wear a normal scary costume, his casual addendum about there being no afterlife is the perfect final twist -- removing even the last possible source of comfort. The child is, in effect, the scariest possible trick-or-treater: one armed with nihilistic philosophy instead of a mask.
References
The phrase "The future is a foreign country" is a play on the famous opening line of L.P. Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-Between: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The comic inverts it to make a point about how the present will become an unrecognizable and forgotten past.