12 Address at Vision 65 I bring you greetings from the country of the DEW line, or early warning system. Canada carries perhaps a potential role as an early warning system. As the United States becomes a world environment, Canada might serve very well as an early warning system for culture and technology, and on many levels. But this is a whimsy. We had a delightful story at lunch about the French actor who expressed the delight he had on the stage because of its permitting him to kiss ladies’ hands. He said: “You know, you have to begin somewhere.” The companion piece to that one is somewhat closer to my predicament— the mosquito in the nudist colony who said: “I don’t know where to begin.” The world of humor, as a system of communications, is one that has occasionally interested people, and we live in a time when joke styles have changed very rapidly. I am told by my own children that the latest form of joke concerns the “Poles,” and they gave me as an example: “Alexander Graham Kowalski—the first ‘telephone Pole.’” This kind of humor is like the slightly older form of the elephant joke and the kind that the computer programmers enjoy—“What is purple and hums?” Of course, the answer is: “An electric grape.” “And, why does it hum?” “It doesn’t know the words.” This kind of joke appeals enormously to youngsters today. If you notice, the tendency in these kinds of jokes, or gags, is for the story line to be stripped off. They tend to be deprived of the old story line, and in its place you have a capsule, a compressed overlay, of stories. In fact, there are usually two stories in these little jokes, simultaneously. The olderfashioned jokes had a straight story line. Steve Allen has a theory that the funnyman is a man with a grievance. In French Canada there are a good many jokes going around these days that are by way of being grievance stories. One of them is this: A mouse being pursued around the house by the house cat finally finds a little spot in the floor to creep in and hide. After a while, everything seems quiet, until suddenly there is a kind of “Arf-Arf-Bow-Wow” noise and the mouse feels the dog must have frightened the cat away, so it pops up and the cat grabs it and chews it down. As he chews the mouse down, he says: “You know, it pays to be bilingual.” That is the old kind of square joke with a story line around it. The new stories tend to be much more compressed and on two levels at once, like the sort of Finnegans Wake phrase: “though he might have been