I have no idea. PG

By Paul Goldfinger

I was sitting on my porch reading all the news that’s fit to print when a neighbor walked by, looked my way, and said, “Why the long pants?”

It was, I thought, an odd question. After all, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be wearing long pants. It was a coolish summer September morning in the Grove, and I chose long pants that morning for a variety of perfectly ordinary reasons.

I mean, if I had no pants, he could, reasonably, question that and say, “Why no pants?” That question would have been perfectly correct under the circumstances. But “why the long pants? ” is an unreasonable question.

The end result was that I felt obligated to explain my choice of pants. I had to justify why I didn’t pick short pants, which he evidently thought would be preferable. Or maybe he was just making small talk. But, as Larry David would say, that’s medium talk—not small talk.

But what really distracted me was that the question immediately brought to mind an old joke, which I felt compelled to tell my neighbor, about the horse who walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender gives him a bourbon and says to the horse, “Why the long face?”

Now that’s funny. My neighbor should have ignored my pants and told me a joke instead. My pants are not funny.