Joe is sitting in a bar that he doesn’t usually visit, when he gets a tap on the shoulder. “Hey, don’t you know who I am?” asks the stranger.
“No, why should I?”
“Hey everyone”, says the stranger, “Who am I?”
“Levine!” replies the crowd.
“You see? Everyone knows me. Everyone knows Levine.”
“Oh, sure, in your own bar, everyone knows you. But in my regular bar, no one knows who you are.”
Levine objects to this, because everyone knows him. So he and Joe go across town to Joe’s favorite watering hole. When they arrive, Levine shouts out “Yo, folks, who am I?”
“Levine! Levine!”
Joe is astonished by this, but still skeptical. “OK, people in bars know you. But I bet the governor doesn’t know you.”
“Of course the governor knows me. Let’s go visit him.”
So they go to the governor’s mansion. A butler answers the door. “Ah, Mister Levine. The governor was just asking about you.”
“Sure”, says Joe. “The governor knows you, but I’d bet that the President doesn’t.”
“Of course he does!”, replies Levine. “Let’s go to the White House.”
So they go to the White House. The President himself answers the door. “Hey, Levine! I was about ta go all nukular on a armadilla!” Cheney shows up, shotgun in hand, but doesn’t fire when he sees his good friend Levine.
“OK”, says Joe. “So the President knows you. But how about someone really important, like the Pope?”
Levine just cracked a smile, and suggested that they go to the Vatican. And so they did.
Upon arriving, Levine explains that the Pope doesn’t meet with just anyone. “I’ll go in, you stay out here, and you’ll see me walking up on that balcony with the Pope. Then you’ll see that he knows me.”
“Yeah, right” says Joe.
A few minutes later, Levine is walking on the balcony with the Pope, talking like old friends, when he sees Joe lying passed out on the lawn. Levine runs down, and revives Joe. “Joe, Joe, what happened?”
“I was standing here, watching you up there, and this nun asks me ‘Hey, who’s that up there with Levine?’”
