AS IS ITS RELENTLESS WONT, the New York Times has brought me bad news, but not just bad news about the world, its standard fare, but about my own life. In a recent Sunday Styles section, the newspaper announced that jokes, formal jokes, with a beginning-middle-and-end structure, are out. “It’s a matter of faith among professional comics,” the paper reports, “that jokes–the kind that involve a narrative set-up, some ridiculous details and a punch line–have been displaced by observational humor and one-liners.” The older kind of jokes now don’t cut it, in other words, aren’t even yesterday.
Reading this, I felt like a man with a store full of hula-hoops, simulated mother of pearl Zippo lighters, and bolo ties. I have a repertoire of perhaps four hundred jokes that are, if the Times is correct, no longer in demand, possibly even in bad taste. Perhaps I should add that I also have the accents to go with these jokes.
I love a well-told joke, which I consider an oral version of a good short story. I once asked students at the beginning of a creative writing course to write out a joke for me. The result was dismal, the jokes dreary, which didn’t bode well for the class.
As for how I came into possession of my large stock of jokes, the answer is that when you tell a joke you tend to get a joke told back to you. Having a small reputation as joke teller, I find people with a nice sense of quid pro quo often have a joke ready for me. A woman who works at a nearby bakery last week stopped me, one of her sourdough breads in my hand, to report: “Joe, my brother is going with a beautiful and intelligent homeless woman.” I looked at her quizzically. Then she continued: “And the best thing about it, he says, is that at the end of the evening he can drop her off anywhere.”
Already you will have seen the problem with the old-fashioned jokes: political correctness, that enemy of wit, paradox, and the clear-eyed observation of human oddity. Freud had it that jokes were essentially a form of aggression. People who subscribe to political correctness would agree. For them there are no good jokes–and they, like Freud, aren’t kidding.
The great preponderance of jokes are about Irishmen, Scotsmen, Poles, blacks, and above all Jews. Nuns, priests, rabbis, dumb blondes, Texans, golfers, and elderly people with undiminished sexual longings also figure in heavily. The homeless woman joke above is of course in wretched taste, but what could be more useless than a joke in good taste?
As other people cannot remember jokes, I find it difficult to forget them. The first off-color (not quite blue, closer to aquamarine) joke I ever heard had the punchline, “Rectum, hell, it almost killed him.” I walk the streets with lots of punchlines in my head: “Comfortable I don’t know–I make a nice living.” “Oy, was I thirsty!” “Whaddya mean Heaven. I’m a buffalo in Montana.” “If she dies, she dies.” “Last night, and then again this morning.” “Who listens?” “If you had a brother, would he like noodles?” “Women of Frampol, I beseech you, move a little.”
To avert being shunned by the politically correct, I could, I suppose, fall back on my better quality animal jokes, some of which feature dogs who have spied on the KGB, grizzly bears from whom Chicago policemen are able to wring false confessions, and parrots who know the full liturgies for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I also don’t mind a joke in which someone is strangling a parrot or threatening to exile him to the freezer for excessive use of profanity, but I recognize that such jokes could easily land me in difficulty with the animal-rights people.
The New York Times also blames the Internet for helping to kill jokes. Too many are now whirring around in cyberspace, instead of passing from person to person, as they were meant to have done. In contradistinction to Mae West’s law about not being able to get too much of a good thing, opening up an email that begins “Have you heard these?” and is followed by 11 flatly told jokes, ten of which one has indeed heard, can take the smile out of Christmas morning.
I have been in the same room with joke-bores, and it is no dejeuner sur l’herbe. I hope I have not myself been one. Yet when a well-to-do woman told me the other day of the hardships she had recently encountered on a bird-watching tour of Costa Rica, I could not help telling her the joke about the woman who goes on a tour that simulates all the conditions of a Roman slave galley and whose punchline has her asking the woman rowing next to her, “Tell me, Mrs. Silverman, when this trip’s over, how much do you tip the whipper?”
I have, as I say, four hundred or so of them. If you’ve heard any of them before, please don’t stop me.
–Joseph Epstein
