Informant: Three ladies were visiting with each other, and one lady said, “I just don’t know what’s happening to me. My mind wanders. I tried to put a broom in the refrigerator the other day!”

The other lady—the second lady—said, “I know what you mean! I was—my husband and I were watching television the other day and I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t remember his name!”

The third lady said, “Well, thank goodness nothing like that has happened to me.”

[informant leans forward to knock on wooden table—knock on wood]

“Yes, come in!”

The informant (my grandmother) was born and raised in Texas. She spent many years moving from place to place across the world with her husband, a banker, before settling in Connecticut long enough to work as an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School. She currently lives in San Francisco, CA.

The informant told me that this joke had gone viral at the old person’s home in which she lives. I believe that this joke might be popular with such an audience because they can relate to the troubles the three aging women face—deteriorating memory, both short term and long term. The punch line of the joke is that the woman who claims to be the most mentally competent and unaffected by aging is, in fact, the one who can’t tell that her own knock on the wooden table isn’t a knock on the door. The joke assumes that the audience knows what the practice of “knocking on wood” means.