In a strange twist on an old joke, the operation succeeded, but the patient lost his ability to form new memories.
Then I thought I'd riff on the old doctor joke: "The operation was a success... the patient died on the table, though".
One neurosurgeon, currently in private practice, told me that his former boss would joke during operations, "If I ever get a GBM, put your finger in your keister and put it in the wound".
After joking about the operation, Williams said that he developed a bad knee after a high school football injury and surgery that did not go well.
But if this were actual cosmetic surgery, an old joke might apply: the operation was a success, but the patient died.
"It's a twenty-four-hour operation," Carmen Perez joked, pointing to the people standing at one of the hydrants.
"I went from Kabul to cable," Mr. Freston joked, joining the fledgling MTV operation as marketing director.
This creates one final, hidden complication: the more blankly frustrated a critic feels, the more she might also suspect that the entire operation was a deliberate joke.
It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.
The conversation circled the room of seven writers for a few minutes, with "I love you" horror stories somehow devolving into jokes about an imagined sex-change operation.
He likes to joke that the scar left by the operation to remove a part of the olfactory bulb from his forehead makes him look like Frankenstein, and his stiff walk, combined with his shaved head, accentuated the impression.
