Talk - a little story from Barry Yourgrau's book "The Sadness of Sex"

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Talk

A man develops a highly sohisticated way of communicating.
It's a language of arcane and inspired symbols, dedicated to the
art of being witty. It has exquisitely abstruse features.  No one
can understand the man, but that doesn't perturb him. He goes
for long walks, and then sits in a scenic area of the park and tells
himself cunning, subtle, utterly brilliant little jokes at which he
chuckles and wipes his eyes and shakes his head, knocked out
by his own genius.

One day a tubby black and white dog follows the man into
the park. It watches the man settle himself onto his bench and
begin murmuring his witticisms. The dog laughs and tells the
man he doesn't have a bad sense of humor at all. The man sits
frozen to the bench. Slowly he turns and looks at the dog.
Disbelief gives way to horror. 'Nobody in the whole world can
understand me', he thinks, 'except for this dog? How clever
does that make me and my language?' The dog sits wagging its
tail, looking on pleasantly. Then it grins. 'You little bastard,' the
man hisses.

That night the man stays up until the crack of dawn, tinkering
feverishly with his linguistic complex. The next afternoon, hag-
gard, he makes his way to the park. The dog comes trotting in
after him. He takes his seat on the bench. His hands are shaking.
He sits on them. He looks down along his shoulder at the dog,
which is seated nearby on the grass, its head cocked and uplifted
in a parody of solicitous attentiveness. The man glares at it. Then
he shuts his eyes and launches pell-mell into the spectacularly
funny and convoluted fruits of his night's labors. He finishes,
gasping. There's dead silence. The dog looks up at him blankly.
Finally it says, 'That's funny?' The man's head reels. He grips the
bench with white knuckles. His whole career swims frenziedly
before him. 'You pompous little mutt, let's see you do better!'
he snarls. 'Okay,' says the dog, and it hops onto its haunches
and tosses off a series of Noel Coward-style drolleries on
contemporary themes, all linguistically polished up like a batch
of rare gems in a velvet box.

The look of horror turns sickly on the man's face. 'Stop it, stop
it!' he blurts out finally. 'Those aren't funny,' he adds, in a stiff
miserable voice. But it's obvious they're all killers, every one of
them. For a long time the man sits staring wretchedly at the dog.
The dog wags its tail quietly, looking off discreetly. Finally
without a word the man rises and wobbles off slowly towards
the exit of the park, his head sunk down between his shoulders.
The dog gets up and follows at a distance for a ways. But then it
stops; it leaves the path and goes over to a tree and raises its
leg; then, smiling to itself, it trots off in another direction.