Octopus

Octopus is a fictional performer in Lionel Essrog’s extended bar joke, not an animal shown acting in the story’s ordinary events. It first appears as the wager’s supposed proof: an octopus that can play any instrument in the bar. Lionel’s increasingly elaborate account makes it a gifted musician, then turns its final encounter with a set of bagpipes into a crude punchline. The creature’s lasting significance lies in the way Lionel and Frank Minna return to its comic world while their real circumstances grow more urgent.

Identity and Comic Premise

The joke begins with a man entering a bar with an octopus and betting the bartender that it can play any instrument on the premises. The bartender tests the claim rather than accepting it, and each challenge gives the creature another chance to perform. Octopus is therefore both the joke’s central character and the engine of its escalating structure: the bartender keeps producing a new instrument, while the man keeps insisting that the wager should be paid.

The premise depends on treating an impossible animal as a working musician. Octopus is not merely able to make noise; it appears to understand and handle the instruments. The gap between the creature’s unlikely musicianship and the narrator’s matter-of-fact detail gives the story its comic logic. Each successful performance temporarily makes the wager seem more plausible, even as the increasingly elaborate animal puns keep drawing attention to the joke’s verbal construction.

The Instrumental Routine

At the piano, Octopus flips open the lid, plays scales, and follows them with an étude. The performance is presented as accomplished enough to prompt Lionel to invent Pianoctamus and Pianoctamum Bailey, expanding the animal’s musical identity through wordplay. Frank Minna remarks that the act is becoming fancy and showy, a response that acknowledges the buildup without ending it.

The guitar supplies another small demonstration of apparent expertise: Octopus tightens the E-string, closes its eyes, and plays a fandango. The bartender still refuses to settle the bet, instead returning with a clarinet. Octopus looks it over and tightens the reed, but this time the result is deliberately less impressive: it squeaks out a few bars rather than winning praise. Lionel’s puns—among them Clarinet Milk and Eat Me—continue to multiply around the performance, while Minna observes that the bartender is drawing the routine out.

The final test is a set of bagpipes. Rather than playing, Octopus examines the instrument, lifting and dropping one pipe, then another, before backing away to squint at it. The man asks whether it cannot play the bagpipes. Octopus answers that it is trying to work out how to remove their pajamas before having sex with them. The punchline abruptly recasts the entire sequence: the creature’s apparent hesitation was not musical difficulty but a grotesquely literal appraisal of the instrument.

Lionel’s Telling and Minna’s Reply

Lionel tells the joke while riding with Minna and Gilbert Coney. Coney is driving hard and overtaking trucks; Lionel taps him on the shoulder six times, but Coney ignores him. The action gives the drawn-out routine a physical counterpoint, as Lionel tries to sustain the story while the car moves urgently through traffic. He pauses before the final punchline, worried about ticcing it out and losing his thread—and, as he explicitly thinks, losing Minna. Octopus’s routine thus becomes more than a self-contained gag: its delays hold open a moment of shared attention between the men.

Minna’s response is restrained. During the long windup his eyes repeatedly close and open, and after the punchline he asks whether Lionel is finished. Lionel does not answer; the car circles the ramp off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and turns onto DeKalb Avenue. The joke does not produce a grand reconciliation or erase the pressure around them. Its effect is smaller and more revealing: Lionel keeps talking, Minna keeps listening, and the story’s absurd patience briefly occupies the space between them.

Later, Minna answers with a miniature variation. Octopus and Reactopus sit on a bench or fence; Octopus falls off, and Lionel supplies Reactopus as the one left. The exchange compresses the earlier joke’s habit of making language generate another creature. Lionel then asks who did this, and Minna has no answer in the cited moment. The quick callback sits beside the evident seriousness of Minna’s condition rather than resolving it. Octopus’s comic world has returned, but now its playful word-making is folded into a conversation shadowed by injury and the question of its cause.

Narrative Significance

Across the two jokes, Octopus moves from a performer subjected to a series of tests to one half of a compact call-and-response. The first appearance takes time: piano, guitar, clarinet, and bagpipes each extend the bartender’s refusal to pay. The second turns on a single fall and a coined name. That contrast gives the creature a recurring form without suggesting that it exists outside the stories told about it.

The joke also shows how Lionel’s verbal play can lengthen an exchange even when the listener’s attention is uncertain. His escalating puns, pauses, and effort to retain the punchline are part of the telling; Minna’s teasing remark and later counterjoke make him a participant rather than merely an audience. Octopus remains an invented comic musician, but the creature’s repeated appearance records a real pattern between the men: they use jokes to keep speaking to one another when the surrounding circumstances leave little room for ease.