TAKING NOTES

What’s so funny about this? This may be one of the most difficult jokes I’ve ever done, especially if you are not a native American English speaker and are not familiar with baseball, the all-American sport with British origins but with a specialized vocabulary all its own. If you grow up here in the States, you hear it everywhere. When you’re a kid you’re playing baseball with your friends and you listen to games on the radio, watch them on TV and if you live in a city of moderate to large size, you attend professional baseball games. It’s just the way it is, in the very same way that the rest of the world is crazy about soccer and talk about it with its own specialized vocabulary, that most Americans are clueless about. I’ll try to explain the joke without going into the rules and vocabulary of baseball except only those items pertaining to the joke. So we see a full house attending a symphony concert, from the point of view of a musician on stage looking out at the audience. We are