Jimmy, then the Dog, walked on.

When they were out of ear-shot of the tourists, it asked, "Did you hear the one about the blind piano player and his seeing-eye dog?"

The first time the Dog told him one of its corny jokes, Jimmy laughed till tears rolled off his cheeks. It was the shock of hearing a dog talk that made the joke so funny, he knew. In fact, as they began to rehearse together, the Dog seemed to be the four-legged essence of comedy itself, words fused with body, a sight-gag telling its own continuous punch line. At the Dog's insistence, Jimmy had willingly recast himself as straightman. He'd humored the Dog's conception of itself as a comedic genius, drawing on method acting to fake interest in the Dog's boring theories on why it was so hilarious--"an understanding that the real appeal of jokes was in their unspoken pathos"--theories so screwy that they really were funny. But as weeks ground into months, and months blurred into a year, Jimmy's smile grew more and more forced. He groaned to think how lately he'd been disguising fits of frustrated anger as hysterical laughter in the hope that he could coax the Dog into repeating one of its rotten jokes at their next audition. Then their next. And the next. Now, down to the single dollar in his pocket, he no longer had the strength to pretend.

"...one day," the Dog was saying,"the seeing-eye dog jumped up on the bar and sat on a patron's martini."

"Don't tell me," Jimmy snapped, "tell it at the audition! Tomorrow!"

"The patron stormed over to the blind piano player..."

"I'm not listening."

"...and said, 'Do you know your dog has his balls in my martini?'"

"And the piano player said, 'No,'" Jimmy said, determined to spoil the joke by spilling the punch line: "'But if you hum a few bars maybe I can pick it out.' Yuk. Yuk."