Child prodigies is a redundancy, since what makes them prodigies in the first place is their brilliance manifests in early childhood.

One of the best known is Picasso, whose first word was “pencil” and whose first painting was at 9. Another was Mozart, who could play songs on the harpsichord at 3 and wrote his first symphony at 5. John Stuart Mill, the Brit philosopher, was a late starter, not being able to read Latin classics till he was 8. Then again, he was reading Greek classics between ages 3 and 7.

There’s no accounting for prodigies’ skills. Instead, all we can do is marvel at them, which we do, for both their genius and renown.

A less renowned, if not wholly unrecognized prodigy, was born, raised, and still lives right here among us. It is me (or if you’re a retentive stickler for grammar, It is I).

OK, so maybe I wasn’t a prodigy in the strictest sense, since there’s no objective way to assess the skill that I’ve had since childhood. But even if I wasn’t a true-blue prodigy, my skill was far more advanced than my peers’.

My skill was my ability to remember and tell jokes.

I don’t know exactly when I started with shtick, but I do know I was doing it in first grade. In fact, I still remember three of my favorite bits that absolutely murdered ’em in Miss Starr’s class (though, old style schoolmarm that she was, Miss Starr was immune to my humor).

I’d learned them from my mother, who was an ironic agent to jump-start my comedic career, since she was no joke teller herself. Au contraire, she was almost unrelentingly serious. But she was also a Wordsmith Extraordinaire. So even though she was never the life of the party, she appreciated humor as one part of wordplay. So she liked puns, riddles, jokes, palindromes, chiastics (Never let a fool kiss you; never let a kiss fool you), and any other forms of wit.

As for my dynamite repertoire at age 5 that she’d endowed me with?

The first was the Mexican weather report — chile today and hot tamale.

The second:

Q: What time is it when you’re clock strikes 13?

A: Time to get a new one.

The third, a masterpiece of subtle wit (at least for a first grader):

Q: When is a door not a door?

A: When it’s ajar.

I got some good yucks from those gems (especially after I explained what “ajar” meant), and my career as a Borst Belt shticker du manque was off and running.

Sources of humor were hard to come by for a stand-up tyke, but since humor was more my compulsion than a hobby, I managed to scrounge ’em from all sorts of sources.

One was in a kids’ newspaper we got in school called The Weekly Reader, which always had some funny little bit geared for kids (Q: What’s a three-letter word for mousetrap? A: C-A-T).

Another was Reader’s Digest, which had great jokes and anecdotes in their sections, “Laughter is the Best Medicine,” “Humor in Uniform,” and “Life in These United States.” And on the bottom of some pages, there were funny little blurbs, most of which were true. All were written simply enough for me to readily understand and retell:

A lady goes into a grocer’s and asks how much does a pound of onions cost.

“A dollar and seventy-five cents,” says the grocer.

“A dollar seventy-five?” she harumphs. “At the Grand Union they’re only a buck-fifty.”

“So,” says the grocer, “why don’t you buy ’em at the Grand Union?”

“Because they’re all out,” she says.

“Well,” says the grocer, “when I’m out, I’ll charge a buck-fifty, too.”

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Gathering material … and momentum

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I also picked up jokes from kids at school, most of which were unfit to appear in a family-oriented newspaper. One that can be told, which while not obscene, perfectly illustrates what passed for schoolboy hilarity among those little sadists. You’d say to some Poor Unsuspecting Slob: “Hey, did ya get the postcard I sent ya?” He’d of course say now, whereupon you’d say, “Gee, I musta forgot the stamp,” and would immediately stomp on the PUS’s instep for all you were worth, instantly ending that kid’s faith in humanity.

In sixth grade, after I discovered Mad magazine, I was never the same. Mad, aside from its brilliant art work, had a great variety of humor, both verbal and visual. But its greatest effect on me was getting me to see the world in terms of caricature, where everything and everyone was ridiculous, bungling, bumbling and babbling. And best of all, no one escaped their skewer — actors, politicians, teachers, preachers, teens, babies — everyone looked like God’s Own Eejit. How accurate a sociological document Mad was, to my knowledge, has never been studied, but my personal point of view was (and still is) that their artists’ depictions were in the 90th percentile — at least.

As for jokes? They were everywhere. Back then, conversation was the coin of the realm. Peeps talked to each other, all the time and all over the place. And so it was only natural that joke tellers told jokes to each other. And when they did, you can bet I was listening to as many as I could — when I wasn’t telling them myself, of course.

Jokes — especially what we called “dirty jokes,” but which’d now be considered naughty, at worst — made the rounds, if not more completely than the post office, than faster. So someone heard a new joke; he told his pals; they told their pals; and within days all the joke tellers and listeners in My Home Town had heard it. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case.

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R.I.P.

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Joke telling has, I’m afraid, become if not extinct, then at least an endangered species. People are too busy pigging out at the electronic trough to care about jokes. Joke telling is a medium that, compared to the impact of electronic media, is too old fashioned, if not too silly, to even be noticed anymore, let alone to compete. Yeah, sure, I still hear a joke now and then, but it’s usually one I heard years ago. And given the rarity of joke telling, most folks don’t know how to tell them well, either.

While I used to hear a new joke at least every couple of weeks, now I’m lucky if I hear two a year. Matter of fact, the last new joke I heard was from Chris Grimone, sometime in late summer.

And speaking of Chris Grimone …

Actually, The Grimones, per et fils, are both good joke tellers. They are also good joke listeners. So I try to stop in every couple of weeks to tell them one they haven’t heard (Which is discovered by my prefacing each joke with, “You ever heard the one about …?).

And speaking of the Grimones, I’ll end by telling my fave joke told by Grimone Pere:

A hillbilly father has gathered his three sons before him.

“Now I wanna know,” says the father, “who pushed the outhouse into the wide Missouri?”

“Not me,” says the first son.

“Not me,” says the second son.

“Not me,” says the third son.

“Awright,” says the father. “Now lemme tell you a story. When George Washington was a little boy, he chopped down his father’s cherry tree. When his father asked him who did it, he said, ‘I cannot lie, Father. I did it.’ And because little George told the truth, his father didn’t punish him.”

The father paused for effect, then went on.

“Now, I’m a’gonna ask again, who pushed the outhouse into the wide Missouri?”

“Not me,” says the first son.

“Not me,” says the second son.

“I cannot tell a lie,” says the third son. “I did it.”

The father then proceeds to give the third son a royal arse-whupping.

When the kid gets done crying, he says, “I don’t git it, Pa. You said when George Washington’s father asked him who chopped down his cherry tree, and he said it was him, his father didn’t punish him cuz he told the truth. I just told you the truth, but you done whupped me anyhow. Why?”

“Because,” says the father, “when George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, his father wasn’t in it!”