The Art of the Joke

I've known for a long time that I'm not good at telling jokes. It's a fine art form at which not everyone is proficient. Today a co-worker told me a joke. It was as he was telling it that I realized how unusual it was for anyone in my generation to tell a joke. It was funny, don't get me wrong;

It was about a guy stuck in the hospital with Montezuma's revenge. He ends up shating his sheets, and is so annoyed with himself he roles them up and throws them out the window. There's a drunk guy down below, who gets hit with this mess, and flails around. Someone comes along and, laughing, asks what he's up to. He says he's not sure, but he thinks he just beat the shit out of a ghost.

The poor presentation of the above joke may illustrate why I don't usually dabble. In any event, I think it's funny. So why don't people my age usually tell them?

Maybe our fast paced lifestyle doesn't usually allow for the telling of jokes which contain lengthy preamble. This would be supported by the fact that I would expect more joke telling in a bar, a place where time is not usually short.

A big reason, I think, is that the joke is by definition canned. I laugh at things that are unexpected. Unexpected irony, association, shared and fondly remembered cultural history are all the stuff of day-to-day humour. The joke is not spontaneous in this way. You know it's a joke. You know you're expected to laugh at the end. With the spontaneity removed, the bar of hilarity is raised higher than it otherwise would be.

But that doesn't mean one can't enjoy a good joke now and then. I'm just not very good at telling them.