"Doctor, I can't stop behaving like a dog."
"How long have you been acting this way?"
"Since I was a puppy!"
This is a case of the patient's poking fun at himself. Since he is at the doctor's office, he is implying in the first sentence that there is something wrong with acting like a dog. Otherwise why would he bring it up? Then, in response to one of the standard psychiatric questions, he admits that he believes he is a dog. So the butt of the joke is the patient.
I probably spoke rashly in my prior post in offering $50 for a joke that doesn't have a butt, and I suspect I'll be fielding jokes for quite a while. I still believe that in some way every joke except a pun has a butt; sometimes, like all butts should be, it's fairly well covered, and sometimes the butt is so big everyone can see it, as in ethnic jokes.
What I didn't expand upon, and which I had intended to in this thread, was my idea that the reason we groan at puns is that we have no one at whom to laugh. We recognize the humor of the pun, but can't laugh because laughter is in humor at the expense of someone else.
TEd
Edited moments later:
And in the story you related, we are laughing at a person's affliction with a psychiatric illness.
