Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

We learned it all in kindergarten

The joke about the dirty joke is a joke

There's trouble in my granddaughter's kindergarten. There's this boy named Willy, and it seems he told a dirty joke. It's not just that he told a dirty joke, actually; it's that he told it to a girl. Or maybe he told it to this girl. He says he didn't. We're not sure what she's got to say about it, at least not yet.

The kindergarten teacher didn't know about it right away. In fact, she might not have done anything about it except that another girl, a girl in the second grade, got to talking to the girl who supposedly heard Willy's dirty joke.

The second-grade girl doesn't like Willy much, apparently. They live on the same street or nearby, and she's had it in for Willy for a long time. So when she talked to the girl who may or may not have heard the joke, the girl in the second grade told a boy in the second grade who is homeroom monitor.

This boy, whose name is Ken, is bigger than Willy and, naturally, a little older. He's a very serious boy, and he likes to look into things. I mean, he's a kind of amateur detective. When he gets older, he says, he wants to be a detective and look into a lot of things.

Anyway, Ken, seeking to be the good detective, told the girl in the second grade to ask the girl in kindergarten to tell her about the dirty joke again. Only she did this while he was hidden in the cloakroom so he could hear what the two girls were saying. Then he wrote it all down and took the paper to the principal.

The principal, whose wife works for the father of the girl to whom the dirty joke was supposedly told (are you following me?), didn't want to touch any of this with a 10-foot pole. So he turned it all over to the second-grade teacher, a believer in (pardon the expression) hands-on practical work. She enlisted Ken's aid still further.

In the meantime, Ken, more or less on his own initiative, went around talking to everyone in the kindergarten class.

He didn't talk to Willy, but he talked to all of Willy's friends. He also didn't talk to the girl who supposedly heard the dirty joke in the first place. He did talk to the girl's mother, though, and she got quite upset. He also talked to almost everyone else, even people who didn't know what he was talking about.

So pretty soon almost everyone in the school knew about the dirty joke. Of course, they didn't know what the joke was, and the girl wasn't telling anybody if there really had been a dirty joke told to her or not.

But before you could shake a stick, everyone in town knew about the dirty joke, even though nobody really knew what the joke was.

People in town and in the school have sort of chosen up sides about the whole thing.

Some of them who knew Willy when he was just running around the neighborhood in rompers have said that Willy was always a kid to watch.

I mean, he was not only smart, they say--he also was clever. Some people even say he was precocious. I'm not sure what they mean by that, but I agree Willy has a way about him.

So that's where the matter rests right now. No one knows for sure whether Willy told the girl a dirty joke or not. But I really wouldn't put it past Willy--his being clever and all, as my aunt says.

The girl in question isn't talking. Her mother is upset. The whole school is upset, and Ken is having a lot of fun talking to anyone who will listen about the whole mess. He's turned out to be a kind of juvenile detective, something more than just a homeroom monitor.

And as I say, no one knows what the joke was about--if, of course, there really was a joke.

I don't know what to believe myself. On the whole, I tend to think the whole episode is a dirty joke.

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