2014-12-23
Explanation
The Joke
Two people are lying in bed discussing the famous Hemingway six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." One of them explains that the story is considered impressive because it evokes such a powerful emotional response (the implication of a lost baby) in just six words. But then the other person proposes an alternative interpretation: what if the baby was born with rocket feet, so it never needed shoes? In this reading, the baby is famous, the family is rich, and everyone is happy. When asked why they would sell the shoes if they are rich, the answer is that the shoes are "major collector's items" -- the only shoes a rocket-footed baby would ever wear. The final twist: even though they are rich and famous, the family is "so entrenched in avarice" that they sell their baby's shoes for money they do not need. The couple concludes: "Hemingway was so deep."
The Humor
The joke takes a famously poignant piece of micro-fiction and constructs an absurdly elaborate alternative reading that completely misses (or deliberately avoids) the obvious tragic implication. The rocket-baby interpretation is wildly creative but leads to an equally dark conclusion -- just about greed instead of grief. The final line, "Hemingway was so deep," is delivered with total sincerity despite the interpretation being completely ridiculous, satirizing the tendency of literary analysis to find profound meaning through increasingly tortured readings of simple texts. The comic also pokes fun at how people discuss literature in bed as a form of intellectual intimacy.
References
- Hemingway's six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." is widely attributed to Ernest Hemingway as an example of extremely concise storytelling, though the attribution is likely apocryphal. It is typically interpreted as implying the death of an infant.