Keith Richards And Elie Wiesel Are Totally BFF

I usually leave the comedy to comedians, but this joke is just too good to ignore. Ok, here goes.

Norman Mailer, Elie Wiesel, Bill Clinton and Keith Richards walk into a bar. They take a booth and Richards excuses himself to go shoot some heroin in the bathroom. Richards returns to find Weisel, Clinton, and Mailer in a heated discussion, just one beer in, about God and theodicy. Richards sniffs his way through the conversation, chiming in, mostly incoherently, every few minutes or so with some swear words. Wiesel, ever the empathetic person, notices that poor Keith just cannot keep up, so he decides to tell a joke.
“Keith”, he says, as he wraps his arm around the rock star. “Let me tell you a small joke.”
Mailer looks at Wiesel with an impish look. Clinton flashes that politician smile of death.
“So Keith,” Wiesel continues, “What do you get when you take a dyslexic agnostic and add insomnia to the mix?”

Richards looks puzzled. Mailer and Clinton look at each other as if to say, “Classic Wiesel move right there.”

Wiesel waits a few seconds both for comedic timing and to give Richards a chance to think.

“I don’t know, Elie, what do you get?” Richards garbles after a minute of silence.

“Well my friend, you get a person who stays up all night pondering the existence of a Dog.”

Mailer chuckles to himself, Clinton guffaws to add to the ambiance, Wiesel smiles warmly, and Richards laughs, but that kind of laugh where you know Richards doesn’t actually get the joke.

Ok, so the joke isn’t funny, or probable at all, but the reality of the following almost absurd situation seems even less plausible, because Keith Richards has won the Norman Mailer Award For a Distinguished Biography for his book Life. Guess who presented the award to Richards? If you guessed Bill Clinton, you either cheated or you have a wonderful imagination. Guess who won the Lifetime Achievement award at the same ceremony? Elie Wiesel, who spoke about, you guessed it, the Holocaust. You can click here if you want some more details of the ceremony, but I prefer to stay in the world of the absurd where all four of these talented man sit in a bar and drink alcohol into the wee hours of the morning discussing God only knows what.