Last week as I was walking in Nori’s for my daily dose of caffeine and consciousness-raising, who to my wandering eyes should appear but my pal Steve Erman.

“Hey, meshugge,” I said in my usual greeting to him.

“Good to see you,” he said in his.

Then, those cliches out of the way, we went on to other, more in-depth cliches. Suddenly, he snapped out of autopilot.

“Hey,” he said, “what was that joke you told me the last time I saw you?”

“Joke?” I said. “What joke?”

“I can’t remember,” he said. “But it was really funny.”

“Oh?” I said. “As if most of my jokes aren’t really funny?”

“No, no,” he said, ever the diplomat. “But that one was really, really funny.”

“OK,” I said. “Can you give me an idea what it was about?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was a Henny Youngman joke about a man and his wife.”

A Henny Youngman joke about a man and his wife? Well, that sure narrowed it. Like asking the name of the politician who lies all the time, or the televangelist whose god is the Almighty Dolla, or the Hollywood has-been with the crappy face lift.

I had as much chance of figuring out which Youngman joke that was as I did finding the Oak Island treasure. In other words, both were lost for the ages.

Steve didn’t remember that joke — or a lot of others — because of where he is on the Universal Joke Spectrum: He’s a near-perfect Omega. I, on the other hand, am a near-perfect Alpha.

The UJS measures how people relate to jokes. Alphas are obsessed with humor, remember vast numbers of jokes, and work slavishly to tell them well. Omegas, on the other hand, like jokes, and may even tell them — when they can remember them, which they never can.

You might think I find it tedious to have Omegas for friends, but I don’t. Sure, I might never learn a joke from them, or even hear one, but I can tell them the same joke five days in a row and they’ll laugh just as loud each time. So, while they’re lousy role models, they’re also great audiences.

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A match with the martinet

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My career as an Alpha started almost when I did. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t enthralled by jokes, quips, puns, riddles, cartoons, comics, practical jokes — anything that could cause some yucks with someone, somewhere, somehow.

And while I consider myself a Generalist of Jocularity, my true metier is jokes, the collecting and telling of them. My brother (an Omicron or a Pi) has said I’m incorrigible when it comes to trying to make people laugh. And while that might sound a bit harsh, it’s also true.

One incident from my tender years illustrates this all too well. It involved my all-time favorite teacher, Louise Wilson.

Mrs. Wilson was my English and homeroom teacher in both seventh and eighth grade. I loved both her classes, and if she’d taught my other English classes, I would’ve signed up for them. She was perfectly organized, never wasted a second of class time, and each class led progressively and seamlessly to the next. My two years with her were the highlight of my Petrova School experience.

But let me clarify something about her: Her classroom demeanor was a helluva lot more like Sgt. Major Dagineau than Our Miss Brooks. Nothing escaped her gimlet eye, no transgression went unpunished. In addition to being a martinet, she was the most sardonic teacher I ever had. To say she had a sharp tongue says nothing — I’ve no doubt if the old girl could’ve used it to cut linoleum.

But that was fine with me, and I came by it honestly: My mother, in her quest to turn me into both a dutiful son and a productive citizen, spared neither the rod nor the word. And while she obviously failed to make me either, she accidentally managed to give me a vast array of skills with sarcasm and repartee. So to me, Mrs. Wilson’s verbal eviscerations were more to be admired than feared.

Plus, I knew she had a sense of humor. She never showed it in class, except for the occasional eye twinkle, but in the company of adults, she was a great wit, and even a joke teller. I knew this because my mother and a bunch of her teacher cronies, Mrs. Wilson among them, often met for lunch (which I dubbed The Blue Hairs’ Blue Plate Special) and my mother always came back with some joke that Mrs. Wilson had cracked up everyone with.

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Transparent humor at its worst

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Now some background to That Fateful Day. Red Skelton was a TV sketch comedian, and my favorite character of his was Clem Kadiddlehopper, a loveable bumpkin with a heart of gold and the brains of a brine shrimp. He spoke in an overdone hick accent and had a weird lisp that made him spit out his S’s, literally. He had lots of funny Clemisms, but my favorite was, “Oy may be dumb, but Oy ain’t thh-toopid!” I not only loved Clem’s antics and accent, but I could do a fine imitation of both.

So that day, when the bell rang and we filed out of Mrs. Wilson’s class, my buddy Georgie Besaw was in front of me. Georgie, I’d decided, would be the perfect recipient of my latest boffo bit.

“Hey, Georgie,” I said. “Would you rather have your real eyes, or glass eyes?”

I was so focused on my shtick I’d paid no attention to Mrs. Wilson. But I found out in a flash.

“That, Robert,” she barked, “has got to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!”

Suddenly, I was on the horns of a dilemma.

One horn was Georgie: Being no fool, he’d jetted as soon as Mrs. Wilson called me out, thus my intended audience was gone.

The other horn was while I still had my punch line, I now had only one other audience — namely Mrs. Wilson.

As I’d said, I knew Mrs. Wilson liked jokes. I also knew she’d never allow herself to be the butt of one — especially one laid on her by a 12 year-old pisher.

What to do?

Time stopped. My heart stopped. My brain stopped.

Then I remembered a Dante quote I’d read in The Bible of the Bourgeoisie — Reader’s Digest: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”

I didn’t know who Dante was, but if he was in Reader’s Digest, I figured he had to smart. Beyond that, I believed in hell back then and sure didn’t wanna end up there.

Clearly, I had only one course of action, and there was no turning back.

I looked Mrs.Wilson square in the eye, and with a goofy look on my face and with a perfect Clem Kadiddlehopper accent said, “But, Mithus Wilthon, glath ith tranthparent!”

Did she laugh? Did she smile? Did she anoint me with an eye twinkle?

I didn’t know, I didn’t care, and I didn’t wait around to find out. Instead, I dashed into the hall, where I was lost among the passing mob — safely out of reach of herself, herself.

So it was a dumb joke with a dumb punch line.

And, I, of course, was just a dumb kid.

But I sure wasn’t a thh-toopid one.