This is called "Radio."
"When I was in sixth grade, a pseudo joke
circulated around the playground and stayed for what
felt to us like an eternity.
Weeks, maybe months.
The story was inevitably told with minor variations
in background information and character development.
And the setting was always shifting
slightly from the North Pole to the South Pole.
But the essential situation tended
to remain largely intact.
A male polar bear and a female polar bear
live happily together on an ice floe until, one day,
it splits apart.
As mama polar bear floats east, and papa polar bear floats
west, mama bear calls out.
And here it was vitally important to pronounce
the punch line with just the right mix
of interrogatory confusion and explanatory fatigue.
Radio.
Several of us would watch as one of us
told the joke to an uninitiated classmate.
And when the punch line was delivered,
we would all laugh maniacally.
The joke, of course, was that there was no joke.
And the point was to prove how compliant all us
sixth graders were.
The listener always followed our lead and laughed and laughed.
The instant he started to laugh, we'd all fall completely silent
and ask what's so funny.
Well, you know, he'd say, still holding his stomach,
No, we'd say.
Tell us.
Well, you know, radio.
Unpersuaded, we would press him further.
And he would retreat to the position
that it just sounded funny, the two polar bears, the ice
floe, radio.
What's funny about it, we'd ask again.
And then he would have to acknowledge that he laughed
only because we were laughing.
Wasn't it supposed to be funny, he would ask.
Sooner or later, we'd laugh at him and explain the situation
and call him that most terrible name.
Conformist.
What we ignored for the most part
was the process by which we, individually and collectively,
had recently been introduced to the situation ourselves.
And speaking strictly of myself for a moment, how comparatively
late in the game I was allowed to be enlightened,
occupy as I did with the singular
position of indisputably least popular person
in the indisputably most popular group."
So that was that one, which I don't know if--
I have to speak to people after.
It might be a generational narrative.
For somebody such as myself, I was born in '56.
I grew up in California.
That story was everywhere, whereas I
gather for people of a younger generation it's
more kind of the interwebs.
What's it called, catfishing?
You know, that kind of peer pressure manipulation
has gone online I gather in many ways.
Not sure if the radio story is alive and well.
Apparently not.