Jokes

Jokes are also a stew, like stories.  JRR Tolkien likened stories to a soup in a cauldron in his essay "On Fairy Stories." Odd bits bubble up, still recognisable from when they were thrown in last night or last millennium even though much of them has become part of the broth. I'm not sure you can get worship without some pagan elements thrown in - not tasty worship anyway.

Jokes and humor in general are similar, as we keep returning to the same elements.  Henpecked husbands, misunderstood directions, the downtrodden turning the tables, dumb-and-dumber - there are dozens of reappearing topics. I was taught in undergraduate theater that people will laugh at food, sex, and money jokes. Moliere is still funny.  I still recall Tom Spivey butchering the line "He is trying to seduce my daughter and steal my money" into "He is trying to steal my daughter and seduce my money," which the director insisted he switch to for the remainder of the production.  "If Moliere had thought of it, he would have written it that way the first time." 

Yet more than story, humor needs fresh ingredients to go in the broth.  Mark Twain is funny, but much of it falls flat now. There are jokes in Plautus that are still used (the one about palm-reading, for example) but not in the same form. A theater owner in NYC who has silent movie slapstick nights finds that Charlie Chaplin is the only one people find funny now. My father loved Ben Blue.

 You can see why it's supposed to be funny, where the laffs go. But who would even smile now? Yet that leads directly to this, which I find marvelous.  I wonder what my granddaughters think.