A friend of mine once misheard someone say to me “so then the joke’s on you” as part of a now forgotten conversation. My friend, stoned out of his mind, seemed to think that this statement somehow meant that I had a “joke” on my physical person or in my possession.

He continued to argue that the expression “do you have a joke on you?” would be understood by most people and that it would actually be a good expression to use in daily life. The friend and I who were having the original conversation could not let this abomination of an expression go unchallenged. Without going into specifics about how this expression could ever be used in actual conversation we went to work explaining to him that a “joke” while a common concept can never in any circumstance be possessed physically by any person, place or thing.

We explained that while yes someone could have a piece of paper that had a joke written on it, that piece of paper is not a joke without someone to read it. Therefore there is no possible way for someone to actually have a joke “on” them at least in the sense where we are talking about a singular joke (instead of perhaps “the” joke as is said in the common expression that started this whole fiasco).

People often times have trouble distinguishing a concept from a physical reality. Most people will tell you that a piece of paper with a joke written on it is a joke, when in fact it is nothing but a piece of paper until someone observes it and interprets it as a joke. Its odd that we treat the physical and the conceptual so similarly when logically they are so different. Each presents itself as equally real in our minds so our minds treat it that way, it is only once we step back and realize that our mind is creating everything, even our notion of “reality,” that we can truly get a glimpse at what is going on.