Punishment: Good morning, Lucius. I just recognized you. It has shaved and lost quite a kilo. Oh, if you look like another! Before you were too high, but now longer.

Lucius: Good morning, yes, Zigor. Thank you, therefore, for having known me is for slimming down, because if not, I would have to spend the day without listening to the best set of words that have been made to me so far.

Punishment: Are you serious? Well, I just happened to myself, as I said. I really had no merit. You don't know where they came from. If I have to be honest with you, I was told that you were not very fond of the word game.

Lucius: I am an enthusiastic advocate of humor. Sometimes I came to think that the joke and the poem are nothing more than two relatives of the same family, one by one and the other because of the enormous importance of the arrangement of the elements and the destruction of the whole that can lead to the disappearance of a single element. In jokes or poems, I wouldn't need anything else. The joke (and within it also the game of words) is the minimum unit of verbal humor, just as the one in literature is the poem (or a perfect line of verses).

Punishment: So surely, I'm so bad a joke storyteller. I start to count on one and advance or disact the sting gracefully, without where I need it, with something I have already said before. Many times I thought I would have to learn by heart to cast my family in dinners (because my child’s family has a lot of habit of telling ridiculous stories during the table), such as the verses or poems taught to us at school. My father-in-law, for example, always counts the same and without changing a word.

Lucius: You are a bad joke, because you want to explain the joke, but you have to recite it, yes. You can't explain a poem. I could say that Sandro Penna has a poem in which he says that being young always consists of not regretting being poured out to the senses and you can agree, but until I recite the poem alive voice you would not feel the real emotion. A good poem and a good joke always has something memorable.

Punishment: So for you, emotion and laughter are the same?

Lucius: Today I would once again believe yes. An emotion influences the correct (or if you prefer, beautiful) and essential disposition of words. That doesn't take away, as I don't value all kinds of poetry, that some kinds of humor have more value than others. Conceptual humor (which reveals the clash between two ideas) or situation humor (which reveals the absurdity of a custom) I prefer much more than the humor that plays with words. Those who can't translate into another language, better than me.

Punishment: I would say it's a slightly snob attitude, which shows a little bit of self-government.

Lucius: I will not throw anyone into the fire for a game of words. But I think that a) shows less imagination, b) makes the road to other types of humor difficult, c) involves the risk of such cheap cratilism, and d)…

Punishment: Aber, aber, aber. Cratilism?

Lucius: Yes. From Plato's conversation (Skull believes that words are intimately linked to their deep meaning). When the word player creates a new two-word – “I make hitzilik”, say, or Euskahalduna – he may be tempted to seek some revelation. Like in poetry.