A story about silly / joy
Dinky and the Joke That Didn't Come
Dinky turns everything into a joke — until the day a joke won't come out. A story about the feelings hiding behind a laugh.
2 minutes to read aloud · 😊 Happy
Watch it read aloud · 3 min
Everybody in Candyfloss Land knows that if you are sad, you go and find Dinky.
Dinky can make anyone laugh. Dinky can make Huffy laugh, on a huffy day, which is a bit like making a thunderstorm giggle.
So when Dinky tripped over a bucket and went splat in the mud, Dinky did what Dinky always does.
"Hehe, oops!" said Dinky, and everybody laughed, and Dinky laughed loudest of all, and nobody noticed that Dinky's knee was stinging and Dinky's eyes were hot.
When Dinky's tower fell down: "Hehe, oops!"
When nobody picked Dinky for the bouncing team: "Hehe, oops!"
When Dinky's favourite mug broke: "Hehe—"
And the joke didn't come.
Dinky stood in the kitchen holding two pieces of a mug, waiting for the funny thing to arrive the way it always did. It didn't. There was just a big grey lump in Dinky's chest, and a wobbly mouth, and no joke anywhere.
Tipsy came in, saw Dinky's face, and sat down on the floor. Just sat.
"You don't have to be funny in here," said Tipsy.
Dinky's chin crumpled.
"Try this," said Tipsy. "Say the real one out loud. Start with I feel."
Dinky swallowed. It felt enormous, like lifting a door.
"I feel... sad," said Dinky. And then, quieter: "I feel sad quite a lot, actually. I just do the joke instead."
Tipsy nodded, slowly. "Thank you for telling me."
That was all. Nobody fixed it. Nobody said cheer up. They sat on the kitchen floor with two bits of a broken mug, and Dinky's sad feeling sat there with them, and it turned out that a sad feeling with a friend beside it is a much smaller thing than a sad feeling on its own.
After a while, Dinky sniffed and said, "It was a rubbish mug anyway."
And Tipsy laughed — a real one.
Dinky still makes everybody laugh. But now, sometimes, Dinky says the true thing first.
