Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
An intellectual came to check in on a friend who was seriously ill. When the man’s wife said that he had “departed”, the intellectual replied: “When he arrives back, will you tell him that I stopped by?”
It’s an oldie but a goodie. Emphasis on the oldie. This joke comes from the world’s oldest surviving joke book, Philogelos (The Laughter Lover) published somewhere around the fourth to fifth century. And to be clear, not all of the jokes hold up.
When a jokester who was a shopkeeper found a policeman screwing his wife, he said: “I got something I wasn’t bargaining for.”
The walls of the doomed city of Pompeii are filled with crude jokes and jibes back and forth between bragging rivals, spurned lovers, and statements that are probably best interpreted as an ancient catty Yelp review. “Epaphra, you are bald!” declares one carving. Funny then, funny now. You are bald, Epaphra. If you don’t like it, go grow some hair about it.
This is all to say that the act of writing, recording and retelling jokes has not only existed for a very long time but existed in a particular form that we can still recognise today. Sometimes crude, sometimes mean, often insanely horny. It’s a form that continues on in one way or another all the way to modern times. The jokes feel so familiar that I can’t help but think there are many lines in that ancient joke book that could slip into a vaudeville routine completely unnoticed.
While our sense of humour remains the same, the nature of joke telling has changed, particularly in the last decade. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be another rant from a middle-aged comedian about how crowds don’t enjoy racism as much as they once did. I’m speaking as a matter of joke construction. It’s rare to see someone open a comedy routine with “three guys walk into a bar”. Timeless, though they are, lately they’ve felt out of date.
That’s not to say they’re extinct entirely. Even now, during each Edinburgh fringe festival a list of the “best jokes of the festival” is published by the Scotsman. Comedians tend to hate the list. Partly out of jealousy, the powerful but unseen force that dictates the lives of all comedians, but also for reasons of joke construction. They’re almost exclusively one-liners ending with a wry pun. While they might not be in fashion, this kind of joke harkens back to the origins of the form, vaudeville comedy.
When they weren’t throwing a pie in someone’s face – which always has been funny and always will be funny – vaudeville comedians needed jokes that could sit comfortably in a slapstick-heavy burlesque show and appeal to an audience of city workers. They had to be fast-paced, a little rude, and culturally specific. Thus, standup comedy was born.
The slow evolution towards autuership in comedy over the decades, a necessary move for an industry desperate for artistic recognition, meant moving away from these joke-jokes, so to speak, and towards less formulaic structures. The downside to this is that bawdy rhymes and simple structures would leave audiences with jokes they could take home with them. Easily packaged, simple to remember, part of the cultural identity already – if you saw a show one night, you’d have a great joke to tell to your friends at the bar the next night.
Now, this would require a great deal more telling, perhaps including an entirely laugh-free acoustic number at the end.
Still, when you hear (usually grumpy older) comedians complaining that people don’t have a sense of humour any more, nothing could be further from the truth. We live in the funniest of all times. I mean this in terms of the well-noted seemingly inherent absurdity of a political world in which parody turns obsolete at an unbelievably rapid rate but also in a quantitative sense of the sheer number of jokes, memes, oddspot news stories and insane viral footage we come across in an average day.
The Greek philosopher Chrysippus is purported to have laughed himself to death while watching a drunken donkey try to eat a fig. This is a man thoroughly unprepared for the world of YouTube, let alone the new age of horror absurdism. We can only speculate how Chrysippus would have reacted to rescue footage of a stretcher spinning wildly as it dangles from a helicopter but I believe it’s safe to say his eyeballs would have fallen out of his head.
The internet has changed the mode and means by which we tell jokes. Old joke formats still exist in places like Twitter, where the pullback and reveal joke is still king, but we’ve found a more efficient way of telling the old standard: memes.
When memes arrived on the scene (he says, stroking a long grey beard), I hated them because it felt as though anyone could make them and there was no real “comedic merit” in them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. They have been essential in a revival of both traditional comedy formats and banter with your mates. They show more imagination than quoting a funny movie line, particularly as purely quotable lines have slowly died. Instead, as Elizabeth Bruenig notes, memes are able to “play with the moods and emotions of an illegible world” likening them to “a digital update to the surreal and absurd genres of art and literature that characterized the tumultuous early 20th century”.
They fulfil exactly the same criteria as old vaudeville standards, easily recognisable, simple to tailor to your immediate context. And they go further, the ability to share goes without saying but also the speed at which every culturally permeating image is instantly transformed into a new canvas from which a thousand more jokes are based. They move at such a pace that even for the incredibly online people, the website Know Your Meme has become as useful as Wikipedia in the quest to understand the world around us. Worth noting, too, is Alexa’s analysis showing the top keywords bringing people to the website are “big chungus” and “the great toilet paper debate”. If you don’t have questions after reading that, I simply don’t understand you.
The heart of it all, though, is a very simple idea. The story of the last decade across every industry has been the structures we previously relied upon falling apart before our eyes and adapting into something weirder and more volatile. Why should we expect the structure of our jokes to be any different?
• James Colley is a comedy writer for Gruen and The Weekly on ABC TV. Send him a joke at @JamColley. Make sure it’s good.
