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GUY RAZ, Host:
Round six of our Three-Minute Fiction contest is now open here on weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. And this time around, our judge novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says one character has to tell a joke and one has to cry, and it's not an easy challenge, she admits.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: I actually do not have any decent jokes.
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NGOZI ADICHIE: I - I've just never been very good at the - sort of the art of joke-telling. And I also find that I really don't enjoy the sort of obvious, you know, knock-knock-knock jokes. I find them quite annoying.
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NGOZI ADICHIE: But I wonder if you have any jokes, Guy.
RAZ: That's a good question. Let me think about this one for a moment. Okay, I got one. A horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks him, why the long face?
NGOZI ADICHIE: Ha, ha, ha.
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RAZ: As you can see, I don't stand a chance this round. But you do. To submit your story, go to our website, npr.org/threeminutefiction, and that's all spelled out, no spaces.
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