Fred Derf Veteran Posted May 24, 2005 Veteran Share Posted May 24, 2005 May 24, 2005. 01:00 AM Knock, knock. Who's there? Nobody at all. Jokes are done One liners trump punch lines WARREN ST. JOHN NEW YORK TIMES In case you missed its obituary, the joke died recently after a long illness, of, oh, 30 years. Its passing was barely noticed, drowned out, perhaps, by the din of ironic one-liners, snark and detached bons mots that pass for humour these days. But when people reminisce about it, they always say the same thing: the joke knew how to make an entrance. "Two guys walked into a bar" or "Did you hear the one about the talking parrot?" The new humour sneaks by on little cat feet, all punch line and no setup. "A joke is a way to say, `I'm going to do something funny now,'" says Penn Jillette, half of the comedy and magic duo Penn & Teller and a producer of The Aristocrats, a new documentary about an old dirty joke of the same name. "If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure." It's a matter of faith among comics that jokes ? the kind that involve a narrative setup, some ridiculous details and a punch line ? have been displaced by observational humour and one-liners (Jerry Seinfeld, come on down!). The joke hung on for a while, lurking in backwaters of male camaraderie like bachelor parties and in monthly instalments of Playboy's "Party Jokes" page. Then jokes practically vanished. To tell a joke at a party these days is to be a cornball and, of course, to risk offending someone. While many in the world of comedy agree that the joke is dead, there is little consensus on who or what killed it or exactly when it croaked. Theories abound: the atomic bomb, ADD, the Internet, even the feminization of American culture. Among comics, the most cited culprit in the death of the joke is so-called "political correctness." Jillette says he believes most of the best jokes have a mean-spirited component, and that mean-spiritedness is out. "You used to feel safer telling jokes," he says. " ... (now) you're worried some might think that you really have this point of view.'' Whatever tenuous hold the joke had left by the 1990s may have been broken by the Internet. The torrent of email jokes in the late 1990s and joke websites made every joke available at once, diluting the effect of what had been an spoken form. While getting up and telling a joke requires courage, forwarding a joke by email takes hardly any effort at all. So everyone did it, until it wasn't funny any more. One paradox about the death of the joke: It may result in more laughs. Joke tellers, after all, are limited by the number of jokes they can memorize, while observational wits never run out of material. And because wits make no promise to be funny, the threshold for getting a laugh is lower than for joke tellers, who battle high expectations. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...id=991479973472 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lanky Posted May 24, 2005 Share Posted May 24, 2005 Never thought of this before but it seems so true and kinda sad really :( Interesting the comments about offending people, I think it is one of the biggest reasons for their fall in popularity. Never thought of it this way before : "If I don't get a laugh im a failure" I guess cracking a joke takes alot of courage these days! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wasabi Posted May 24, 2005 Share Posted May 24, 2005 interesting but tell the writer that knock knock jokes will outlive his analysis and the memory of him Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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