Matters of Interpretation

Here’s an old joke I thought of today. You can tell it lots of ways, but this is how I heard it:

It’s some Soviet bloc country, and a military shoot-on-sight curfew has been imposed for some reason, so these two soldiers are patrolling the street. It’s 25 minutes to curfew. They see a guy hurrying down the street, so they stop him and ask him for his papers, all polite, he shows them, they’re all in order, so off he goes. Hurrying.

Then one of the soldiers shoots him in the back.

And the other soldier says “Why’d you do that?!!”

And the first soldier says “Oh, I know where he lives, he’d never have made it home before curfew.”