When I was a little boy, I wanted a dog desperately, and we had no money. My parents got me an ant. I called it "Spot." Coming home late one night, Sheldon Finklestein tried to bully me. Spot was with me; I said "Kill!" and Sheldon stepped on my dog.

The joke turns on a child’s earnest desire for a pet colliding with poverty and absurd substitution: an “ant” named Spot. Allen’s comic persona—neurotic, put-upon, and perpetually unlucky—frames even childhood as a sequence of humiliations. The punch line hinges on misdirection: the boy gives a melodramatic command (“Kill!”) as if he had a fierce guard dog, but the “dog” is an ant, and the bully’s casual step becomes a grotesquely literal act of killing. The humor is dark but also self-mocking, suggesting how bravado and fantasy collapse under reality, and how small vulnerabilities can feel catastrophic in memory.