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May 24, 2005
That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
But that joke isn't funny anymore
It's too close to home
And it's too near the bone
It's too close to home
And it's too near the bone
More than you'll ever know ...
- The Smiths, That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
Seriously, The Joke is Dead by Warren St. John in today's New York Times is a fascinating read into the obsolescence of a narrative form, perhaps with insights extending into the extinction of other narrative art forms. In the article, St. John speculates as to a number of reasons for the death of the joke: shortened attention spans without the patience for the set-up, the dominance of the observational style, an adversity to risk, increased political, cultural and sexual sensitivities and correctness, and perhaps, the atomic bomb, ADD, the Internet and even women. Yes. Women.
Women, it appears, were far ahead of their time, favoring the personal and observational style over the joke, whose intrinsic form required distance and often mean-spiritedness. While men were cranking out jokes in locker rooms, women were honing humor into its modern form. This evolution of contemporary humor saw the form, "Two men walk into a bar..." morph into "I was walking down Broadway and..."
But then again, the death of the joke might have begun a slow painful death in the Ancient Times. "Scholars say that while humor has always been around - in ancient Athens, for example, a comedians' club called the Group of 60 met regularly in the temple of Herakles - the joke has gone in and out of fashion." There was also Plato's Cave, which some have argued to be a concept for a future cinema. Our passive cinematic gaze requires no interaction, a requisite of the set-up form that is the joke. The action automated and media controlled.
Which is why if the Internet killed the art of letter writing found in the likes of Twain, Groucho Marx, and H.L. Mencken, its simply mauled the joke.
"Whatever tenuous hold the joke had left by the 1990's may have been broken by the Internet, Mr. Nilsen said. The torrent of e-mail jokes in the late 1990's and joke Web sites made every joke available at once, essentially diluting the effect of what had been an spoken form. While getting up and telling a joke requires courage, forwarding a joke by e-mail takes hardly any effort at all. So everyone did it, until it wasn't funny anymore."
Posted by rst at May 24, 2005 04:33 PM
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