Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, “Not many laughs.” S. J. Perelman, another writer I once thought immensely amusing, has also over the years lost his magic, at least for me. Time, that relentless monster, seems to have done in both writers, each considered a great humorist in his day.
Time is even harder on jokes. One of Henny Youngman’s characteristic quickie jokes used to go: “A bum came up to me on the street and asked me for 50 cents for a cup of coffee. When I told him coffee was only a quarter, he replied, ‘Won’t you join me?’ ” Today one would have to change the egregiously politically incorrect “bum” to “homeless man,” and have the man ask for $6 for a cup of coffee. When you tell him coffee is only $2.75, he replies, “I have a hankering for a chocolate croissant to go with it.”
Whole categories of jokes have been wiped out by losing their historical context. A popular genre in my adolescence was the traveling-salesman-and-the-farmer’s-daughter joke. Slightly off-color—turquoise more than blue—these jokes began with the salesman’s car breaking down and his being given shelter for the night in the home of a nearby farmer, with mild sex comedy to follow. But today salesmen rarely travel by car, no farmer would let a stranger in his house, and the farmer’s daughter is unlikely to be all that innocent.
Or consider Jewish-waiter jokes. The punchlines alone are magical: “You vant to see the sommelier? Lady, if it ain’t on the menu ve ain’t got it.” “You vanted the chicken soup, you should’ve ordered the mushroom-barley.” Alas, Jewish waiters, all of them Eastern European immigrants, no longer exist, and their sons have long ago gone off to become periodontists and sociologists. Jewish-waiter jokes may themselves soon seem as otherworldly as Martian jokes. “Does everyone on Mars wear rings with diamonds that large?” one such joke asks. “Yes, everyone” the Martian woman answers, “except of course the goyim.”
Then there is the question of changing prices. Mickey O’Brien, ascending the stairs of a neighborhood bordello, meets his father coming down. “Dad, you?” he says. “I figure,” says his father, “for three dollars why disturb your mother?” Three dollars was the entry fee in such establishments in my youth. I have no notion what it might be today, or even if bordellos still exist. The advent of the pill and the radically altered mores of nice girls long ago put most of them out of business. One might have thought the prostitutes would have protested their unemployment. Instead, one might say, they took it lying down—one might say it, that is, if one has a taste for wretched puns.
Apart from the brave staving off of the Nazis at Stalingrad and a few scientific discoveries, the only accomplishment in the 72 years’ existence of the Soviet Union, whose leaders were responsible for millions of murders, general suffering, and a nightmare world of envy and fear, was providing the background for a dozen or so jokes. But 20 or so years from now will there be many, or even any, people left who will get the joke about the man who buys a drab gray car on which he is told delivery will take precisely 10 years? After buying the car, he asks if they would please bring it in the afternoon. When asked why the afternoon, he says that he has the plumber coming that same morning.
Jokes about shrinks may soon be another casualty. Before a fairly large audience I recently told the joke whose punchline is “Oedipus, Schmoedipus—the main thing is a boy should love his mother,” and got a good laugh. But now that no one in his right mind any longer believes in the Oedipus complex or most of the other shrinkinese mumbo jumbo, for how much longer will such jokes be viable?
An anthology of classical Greek jokes called Philogelos (Laughter Lover) features jokes about doctors, men with bad breath, eunuchs, barbers, men with hernias, bald men, cuckolds, and shady fortune tellers. Every subject listed, poof!, is gone. (When was the last time you heard a good eunuch joke?) Is there any way to prevent the jokes of our own era from similarly falling into the dustbin of history? Look for subjects of greater generality, perhaps? Of less ephemerality? Of wider interest? But then, it is precisely their particularity, their timeliness, their parochialism even, that give jokes their piquancy. Jokes, like beauty, may be destined to fade. Nothing for it, but to laugh now, before the joke itself disappears.
