–Mordecai Richler
One of the great mysteries of life to me– besides “How Do Babies Get Made?”– is from where do jokes come from. As the lowest order beneath-the-rock humorist, I create the rare original one-liner about the flagrantly apparent shortcomings of bureaucrats and politicians without number. Many times, I just steal old jokes and rewrite them.
EXAMPLE: “Did you hear Frank Ferry walked into a 7-11 and it immediately turned into a 6-10?”
Ba.
Doomp.
Ba-boomp.
Thank you. Thank you very much. You’re a beautiful audience, full of mirth, happier than Marlee Lauffer at a SCOPE picnic.
I know people get paid to write jokes for Jay Leno and David Letterman. But there seems to be some subterranean culture that almost instantaneously creates jokes and disseminates them into the ether. It used to be you’d wait maybe two, three days for the topical humor. In the business world, you’d get calls from back east first by phone, then by fax. Now we have e-mail. I get 20 jokes a day, easy.
Who makes up these ditties?
Lots of people pass them along. Jokes are the number contaminant of my otherwise sacrosanct e-mail address at home. But a friend will build some 12-pound address list and mass mail “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” to all his friends and before you know it, I’m getting spammed with offers from oddball companies asking if I’d like to address envelopes in my own home or would I be interested in making a fortune in selling oil depletion allowances.
I can’t recall passing on a joke. I probably have. But it’s been a while. I’d still like to know who invents the actual article.
When the space shuttle crashed years ago, within 24 hours, there were these harsh chards of humor about astronauts in one’s tuna. The nation was shocked, heartbroken over the loss of these good and brave people.
But, within a day — and this was before Internet life — the telephones were lighting up across country with astronaut-tuna jokes.
Who invented that original off-color set-up and punchline?
Jokes never seem to carry bylines.
They just appear from the froth, like Aphrodite, fully formed. Or was it Athena. Can’t remember.
I can tell you a little about laughter and humor, about their deep roots. I did a report in college a long time ago and it seems that anthropologists deduce that laughter was a release mechanism that helped the heart and organs depressurize in ancient man.
You’d have an event, like a saber-tooth tiger in the neighborhood. A guard cave guy would sound the alert cry. Adrenaline would be pumped into the system and we were ready for a dead sprint toward somewhere. But when we didn’t scatter for higher branches or a cave or just anywhere but where we had been standing, some distant relative on the family tree would sound a guttural “all clear” sign and that sign would be, literally, a laughing sound.
Jokes and predatory sneak attacks have the same set-up. You have the event, ascertained as danger, followed by drama leading to climax, then, release.
Social anthropologists speculate that that danger-release pattern grew with us into early forms of unintentional slapstick. Someone would bump their head on a low-hanging cave ceiling — event. Everyone in the cave would be put on alert — suspense. When they ascertained the poor Cro-Magnon wasn’t seriously hurt and just had a bump on the noggin, there was laughter — release.
I wonder why there are no jokes in the Bible. I wonder if there ever were.
In her last days, I’d visit my mom at what some jokingly called a home. It’s not. Yet, it is. How she hung in there. Our conversations became simpler and simpler. Many my questions were repeated, then sometimes simply dropped. They weren’t very important questions in the scheme of things, anyway. But I marvel how Katherine kept her sense of humor, through medication, being strapped into both wheelchair and bed (Katherine had a passion for freedom and was always concocting escapes. Finally, she did.)
Toward the end, I remember she wasn’t doing well, drifting in and out. I stood next to her bed and asked if she had heard any good jokes. She offered a tired, “No.”
I asked if she were a picky eater.
“What?”
“Are you a picky eater?” I repeated.
She said, “Yes.”
“Then how do you like your pickies cooked?” I asked.
She laughed. Big time. It’s not my joke, but it’d be nice to find the guy or gal who invented it, just to say thanks, it lightened that enigma we all carry — a timeless but aging heart.
John Boston has earned 119 major awards for writing stuff. Besides The Mighty West Ranch Beacon, his work appears in the prestigious thebostonreport.net just about every darn day. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon. Read Boston’s daily blog, his Daily English Muffins, the Adventures of Job Hunter and more of John Boston’s award-winning commentary on thebostonreport.net