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Typically, humor fails when a joke fails to yield a punch line. You can tell by the deathly silence.

But sometimes, rarely we admit, it ends up the other way around, with a punch line in search of the joke.

Which brings to the latest episode in the Nehemiah Ingram story.

You may remember Ingram as the Temple basketball player inserted by a fuming John Chaney into the St. Joseph's game Feb. 22 as a "goon" (Chaney's word) to protest the scourge of moving screens. Ingram, 6-foot-8, 275 pounds and built like a brick Oldsmobile, fouled out in about 19 seconds. One of those fouls broke the arm of St. Joseph's forward John Bryant, causing an ever-expanding suspension for Chaney and a national debate on whether he deserved to be fired.

He wasn't, ultimately, although he was blamed (and correctly so) for Bryant's injury, as well as the insult delivered to Ingram by labeling him by his job description that night.

Well, Ingram has decided to walk on to the Temple football team as a defensive lineman, apparently putting his now-famous skills to a more contextual use. In other words, beating the hell out of other players with permission.

This should be funny, at least by the typically subterranean standards of the day, but somehow it misses. I mean, yes, there's some sort of mutant irony in the tale – basketball player finds his inner football player and all that – but the secret to humor is this:

Someone has to be the butt of the joke. And for some reason, Ingram doesn't work as the joke butt.

Here's the problem. Ingram wasn't known as a brute on the hoof before Chaney went nuts. In fact, he wasn't really known at all – just another Owl on a typical Owls team.

But fame was wrapped around a cricket bat and swung at his throat that night in Philadelphia, because Chaney sent him into the game with the sole and expressed purpose of putting a grade-1 hurt on whatever Hawks players happened to be in his line of sight.

In other words, he was doing what he was told. He could have refused, one supposes, but not without being dismissed from the team, and besides (and you'll have to squint really hard to make this make sense), he wasn't told to injure anyone, just hurt them.

That's hurt, in that "hard foul" kind of way that happens every night in a hundred gyms across America.

It was just Ingram's bad luck that Bryant's arm was broken. It was also Bryant's bad luck that Bryant's arm was broken, and let's be clear here in saying that Bryant gets the biggest slice of "victim a la king" here.

But Ingram was portrayed as a secondary victim in the great post-incident debate. Chaney took all the heat, as he should have, because Chaney was the one with the grand idea of channeling the spirit of Jungle Jim Loscutoff and the other great NBA goons of the '50s.

And believe it, the NBA had some big-time goons back then. The league was smaller, the towns in which it played were smaller, the jobs were less secure, and beatings were handed out like Starbucks cards – on a nightly basis. It was coin of the realm.

So Ingram's decision to walk on to the football team seems superficially to be an example of someone finding his true inner thug. Yeah, bloody hi-larious.

Only Ingram isn't a thug, at least not based on what we know. He didn't run into the game and clock Bryant on his own. He didn't exceed instructions. He did precisely what he was told, the way he was told to, and did it efficiently and quickly.

And Bryant's arm? The unintended coconspirator.

Somehow, that doesn't cause you to double over in thigh-slapping, commode-hugging, involuntary hilarity the way you think it should.

It's just one of those odd, man-ain't-life-weird tales that leaves you scratching your head. Wanting to laugh, but not sure what exactly the funny part is.

Maybe we're just missing it, though. Maybe it's just a matter of the delivery, or the person telling it.

If there is a joke here, maybe John Bryant can tell it. Then we can all have a good howl.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com