• For as long as I've known you, you've always loved peculiar jokes.
• That's almost exactly right. You know how it is — they're either peculiar or unfunny. Sure, I can joke in different ways, but more often than not it comes out the way it comes out, yeah.

• But why? You could express humor through some other substance.
• But why?

• So you actually like jokes like that?
• Of course not. I'm compelled to joke that way.

• Hold on, are you trying to insult the target of the joke right now? Like, they wouldn't get any other kind of humor.
• No, I'm saying exactly what I'm saying, don't drag it into the moral plane.

• I still can't grasp how you reconcile jokes like these with, say, reading someone like Rousseau. Clearly you're lying somewhere.
• I want to and I'm compelled to — those are different things. Turgenev has a thought that the appearance of the mundane is often useful in life: it slackens strings tuned too high, sobers self-assured or self-forgetful feelings, reminding them of their close kinship with it.

• My subconscious critic loves to joke like this; that's how it defends itself against the consciousness philosophizing too much.

• Then I can't figure out where your Self is. One thing you want, another you're compelled to do.
• I don't understand it myself. But nowhere am I lying.