Joke repetition.

The other week I was talking with my parents on the phone, and I mentioned to my mom that I was going to see Verdi’s “Joan of Arc” that weekend, since a local opera company was putting it on.

She started to say something, and I cut her off and was like, “Don’t tell me how it ends!”.

(The opera, by the way, ends with Joan escaping from the stake, leading the army to battle once more, than ascending bodily to heaven...  They changed the story a bit, as it turns out.)

She then said that like half a year or a year before that, before she retired, she was at the library and had finally got off the waitlist for some book on the Mayflower, and was talking about it with the library’s IT guy, and when he had started to say something, she had said the same thing.

When she said that, I vaguely remembered that story, and I wonder whether I subconsciously filed away that joke, or if I simply re-invented it.