The following story is a joke collected from an older cousin during a brief car ride to a hiking area. Instead of turning to music or media-based entertainment as means to pass and occupy time, my cousin and I tend to exchange long dialogues of personal philosophies and other similar thoughts. Because these types of conversations tend to last for extended periods of time, and given that this car ride would only last about ten minutes, we instead opted to share our favorite ‘dirty jokes,’ ie, anecdotal passages of humor that typically rely on sexual topics as their main basis of humor.

The joke goes as follows:

“So this man, just your average joe, he’s driving around in backwoods Louisiana, taking in the manner of the country and whatnot, looking for some local character.

He comes up on a bar, this nasty old shack of a place right on the water. Rickety, pieced together, looks like a hell of a time if you can manage to handle it. Anyway, he walks up to the front door with a few hints of second thoughts and then sees a bright yellow notice posted on the front. Big capital letters, reads: ‘Lifetime of Free Beer for anyone who completes the Three-Tier Challenge.’

So the guy shrugs and goes on in. Place is a madhouse, needless to say. He doesn’t fit in at all with his office drone attire compared to all these boondocks Louisiana maniacs.  Sure you can picture that pretty easily. Anyway, he goes up to the bartender and tells him he’s interested in the Three-Tier Challenge.

Guy looks at him like he’s crazy. ‘You sure?’

The man nods, and the bartender tells him the details:

‘Alright, well first, you gotta down a bottle of our specialty flaming pepper tequila. Without crying. Second, there’s a mean ol’ fifteen foot alligator out back with a sore tooth. And once you get that tooth out, you gotta head upstairs and take care of the roughest, toughest hooker in all of Louisiana.’

The man nods. And he goes ahead and starts.

He gets set up with the pepper tequila, and after a few long and painful minutes, he gets through the entire bottle without a single tear. Everyone’s impressed.

He stumbles out the door, drunk as shit, where the alligator’s waiting for him. Closes the door behind him. Everyone inside thinks ‘oh boy, this guy’s a goner’.

And then they hear the sounds. Thrashing, roaring, the most terrifying shrieks imaginable. Noises they don’t think could possibly come from either the man or the alligator. Even the toughest souls in that saloon are haunted to the core. The noise stops. Everyone’s quiet.

In walks the man, his outfit torn to pieces, covered in blood. He looks at the bartender and asks

‘ALRIGHT! WHERE’S THAT HOOKER WITH THE SORE TOOTH!’ ”

This particular joke certainly shows the effectiveness of using the combined surprise of subverted expectations and abrupt endings as a comedic tool. In this instance, the listener is expecting to hear the encapsulating line to the joke following the patron’s completion of the third task, but instead, his faulty (and cringe-inducing) completion of the second task serves to cut the joke short without leaving anything unresolved.