I realised that young people have no conception of telling jokes when one of our children revealed that they didn’t know, or couldn’t recall, the riposte to: ‘A horse walked into a bar…’ The old joke was still well-known enough just 12 years ago for David Grossman, an Israeli novelist, to use it as the title of his Booker-winner tragi-comedy about an erratic stand-up. But now – forget about it. The discovery left me long in the face.
Gen Z simply doesn’t know what jokes are
Older Millennials were born just about in time to catch the tail end of joke telling, an oral tradition that stretches back to prehistory. But Gen Z simply doesn’t know what jokes are. It’s odd, because they spend so much of their time scrolling TikTok or Instagram to watch other people talking about random things in short bursts, a format that would work perfectly for joke telling. But it hasn’t seeded there. Jokes are too analogue.
Sitting with this discovery was a parallel realisation: I no longer tell jokes myself. And nor does anyone else. I don’t think I have done so in over ten years. ‘Pedro the boat-builder’ (punchline: ‘But I f*** one pig…’) was the last one I told with any regularity. I think I liked it because of the jarring proximity of pathos to bestiality. The most recent joke that I recall learning – the deflated infant balloon who had let his dad down, his mum down and most of all himself down – must have been circa 2010. In the digital age, memorised, formally structured jokes have gone the way of all other oral traditions.
We still make jokes – I make them constantly, to varying degrees of responding mirth – but we no longer tell them. Jokes exist to tell us something about the absurdity of the human condition. Take Woody Allen’s gag at the end of Annie Hall. ‘A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says: ‘Hey Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ Then the Doc says: ‘Why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says: ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’’
In case you’ve missed the point, Allen goes on: ‘I guess that’s how I feel about relationships: they’re totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.’ He’s right that jokes often have a kind of sad folk wisdom about them: ‘Does your dog bite?’ ‘It’s not my dog,’ and so on.
Many previous staples would no longer be tolerated for cultural sensitivity reasons. Nicky Campbell recently got into a spot of disciplinary bother at the BBC for telling a (presumably comic) story that involved the use of the dated derogatory slang term ‘pooftah’. Had he instead told, say, the seventies joke whose punchline was ‘Death…by Bongo’, then he might have been arrested.
Frank Carson, a TV regular half a century ago, used the catchphrase ‘It’s the way I tell ‘em’. This acknowledged, rightly, that very often it was the build-up that caused any laughter rather than the often predictable or even underwhelming punchline. This was demonstrated over and over in what amounted to weekly televised masterclasses in joke telling from the likes of Ronnie Corbett, in his dedicated chair, or Dave Allen: the way you told them was everything.
Nowhere was this more vividly – and disgustingly – demonstrated than in The Aristocrats, the 2005 feature-length documentary that featured dozens of US comics, including Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock and Sarah Silverman. Each tells the same joke in their own grotesque way and, as the punchline is the film’s title, it’s all in the telling. One of the most memorable lines is ‘the c*sucking mother**ers’, which gives a suggestion of quite how depraved this telling gets. But that’s the point.
The only place that jokes have any public currency these days is as a promotional offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe, which picks the best joke annually. This year’s winner is almost upon us. Last year’s was Andy Gleeks with: ‘I had to visit the trauma unit last weekend… He prefers the term ‘Dad’ lol.’ If you don’t find that funny, it may be because it’s not aimed at you. I sense an attempt to engage a younger audience, and Gen Z are obsessed with their mental health. The award’s very existence is misleading because stand-ups no longer tell jokes in the manner of Carson or Corbett. They riff on situations instead, which has also contributed to the terminal decline.
So what did happen when that horse walked into the bar? Well, the barman said: ‘Have you heard any good jokes lately?’
And the horse said: ‘Neigh.’
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