A friend's last night in town. A porch. A couple of beers. A cool summer breeze. Nothing to do for at least another 10 hours, before it was time for the Monday morning commute. It was one of those nights.
As sunset faded into sunrise, my friends and I began to pull out some good ol' jokes. I had one. a someone else had another, and someone else shared another. Each was funnier than the last. Not, perhaps, because of the actual jokes content. Not even because of the numerous six packs.... It was just so damn funny. Or fun, perhaps, is more apt. And so, having shared the handful of quips the composed our communal repertoire, we decided we needed more.
Enter: the internet. Or rather, the wireless laptop. Shiny, fast, pretty and oozing with webpages made by people with less taste and more time than us. A google search of "jokes" will yield gazillions of pages. You can also narrow down the exact type of joke you're looking for: "Your momma jokes", "German jokes, "Dirty jokes", "dead baby jokes" (which I still, for some mysterious reason, just don't get), "Hellen Keller jokes" (which I still, for some mysterious reason, just love) ...... You name it, and you can find a joke about it! (I realize as I write this, that my hatred of dead baby jokes and love of Hellen Keller jokes may reflect the fact that my sense of humour has an age range of about 9-12 years old.)
Well, this gave us another hour's worth of material. And a whole new game, with different rules. In this one, one person read the jokes straight off the computer. It was sort of like adding a third party to the joke equation: the computer told the joke, the reader relayed it, the audience laughed.
But something about all felt very.... un-fulfilling. Like, kissing someone you sorta, kinda, maybe like: It's all good and fun, until you come up for air.
I realized (cue sappy music) that the beauty of the joke-telling-experience is not the joke itself, not even the delivery, but the teller him or herself. Nothing beats watching your incredibly squeamish friend finally purge the word "pussy", or seeing your friend laugh his way through a joke about rabbits that doesn't even make sense, because in his bizarrely twisted mind is brilliant.
And so, in keeping with my grandmother-like nostalgia (see: my internet-less love live in
Facebook is for Lovers, or my desire for prudishness is entertainment in
Am I doing it Wrong? Or is sex the new kitchen sink?) I will once again put the mild contempt back into contemporary culture.....
I would rather hear one, genuinely recounted joke, passed on from multitudes of drunken bartenders, or sugar-high six year olds, than a thousand hilarious jokes, categorized alphabetically with a rating out of 10 for "dirtiness".
So, today, go tell someone you love a bad joke. And tell it horribly. They'll thank you. Or throw a drink in your face. Either way, I guarantee you'll be met with laughter.
