Joelle's Q-interview: the part of the joke he didn't know

Irony outliving the ironist. Joelle's close — the Master buried with a man whose grave is itself now lost, "buried, now" — hands Jim a final turn even he couldn't have authored. She grants the dead man the last laugh he can't hear, and in doing so fuses sincerity and irony one last time: an affectionate, grief-shot certainty about a dead man's sense of humor that is itself the only surviving evidence of what he meant. The dry joke's terminal form is one nobody living can confirm and nobody can get the punchline of — which is, exactly, the joke.