If You Can't Tell Jokes

    "Tell me about yourself," I said, chewing.
    "I was born, grew tall and fair, knew both joy and tears, grew old, and died an abbess."  Phlox, recognizing early that she lacked a strong sense of humor, or rather that she lacked the ability to make up jokes, had memorized thousands of bizarre passages from books and from here and there, and had developed, in place of humor, an ability to drop these bombs into a conversation, sometimes with incongruous, killer accuracy.  SHe had, in fact, a number of unlikely conversational skills, or rather stunts.  She knew and could explain with admirable clarity the secrets of machinery, how elevators tell the third floor from the fourth, why a spot is born and quickly burns away when a television is turned off; she could mentally alphabetize a fairly long and random list of words; and, most impressively, she remembered everything anyone had ever told her about himself, trivial things -- the name of a childhood pet goldfish or distant cousing.  This last ability made her the bane of the casual liar.  Deceiving her demanded a great deal of care and attention.

-- From The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon