Conehead humor -- funny or not?

I once heard that men lose their sense of humor after age 50. A chemical in their brains dries up or something, and they don’t find anything funny anymore.

It may not be true. I hope it isn’t. But it comes to mind because the other night I was exposed to a pretty big joke, and here it is two weeks later and I still haven’t laughed.

It was a Friday, and we had late-night guests from out of town, my nephew Joey and his fiancee. At 1:30 a.m. I told them to follow me down Top of the World hill so they could get back on the canyon road without confusion.

I drove down Park, and as I went into the hairpin turn below Thurston Middle School I saw a shape or two walking up the hill but I didn’t get a good look at them because you have to watch the road right there.

There’s been a lot of activity recently on Park. Workers are digging out a pedestrian sidewalk and have narrowed the road with about 300 of those vertical orange ? well, they call them cones but they’re more like cylinders. As I came out of the turn, these cylinders suddenly took on a hallucinatory, double-vision quality. Instead of flanking the roadway, they were everywhere. They were all over the road.

It was like coming home late to find the living room furniture had been replaced by 300 orange batting tees. Someone turned Park into a giant nightmare slalom. And no, I wasn’t; I haven’t had a beer since 1985.

I had two seconds to react. At critical moments I sometimes ask myself what Steve McQueen would do, but in this case I knew he would have made his own lane by plowing head-on through all 300 cones all the way down to the high-school swimming pool, and I had impressionable young people behind me.

So I weaved slowly between the cones, into the oncoming lane and back, until I reached some that were too close to drive between and came to a stop, sideways, across both lanes. The car behind me stopped too, and my nephew got out to throw two or three cones aside.

“It’s kids!” he called. Joey’s originally from Missouri and is familiar with rural hijinks.

We resumed our tortuous broken-field driving the rest of the way down Park.

No one came up while we were coming down, for which amen.

When I got back home, I called 911, but by then someone else must have tried the hill because the dispatcher said, “The cones? We’re on it.”

I don’t know who moved them in the first place, or why. It was apparently a joke, but I don’t get it. Granted, when I first came out of the turn and saw those orange sticks standing all over the road, my expression must have been priceless. So I guess it was funny.

But I’m past 50, so I can’t really tell.