Comedy Theory Articles

[Munchkin]

You've got to be joking
by Paul Connolly
Sun-Herald 12/09/2004

No one tells jokes any more, yet comedians are infiltrating mainstream TV and radio.
Paul Connolly explores the funny thing that's happening to our sense of humour.

Not so long ago, comedian Dave Hughes recalls, it was customary for Australians to embellish a get-together with a round of jokes. "I can remember when the joke-telling session was pretty common," says Hughes in his signature nasally drone that brings to mind a light aircraft experiencing mechanical difficulties. "Groups of blokes at the pub were especially fond of it, trying to outdo each other, you know?"

For those who don't, such sessions would go something like this: most in attendance would rack their brains and confess they could never remember the damn things, while someone would begin one only to give away the punchline prematurely. But out of the throng there was always some "character" who would peel jokes off like Monopoly money: "What's an innuendo? An Italian suppository" or "How do you know when a Toorak/Double Bay woman's husband has just died?

She's the one wearing the black tennis skirt." That sort of thing.

Invariably, such jokes would elicit responses including laughter, silence (ouch), pained groans (as in, "there's something fundamentally wrong about that") and tepid "ha-has" (as in, "that stunk like last week's prawn heads but I feel sorry for you"). But that was then.

Nowadays, it seems, the joke, at least in its verbal form, is an endangered species. "I can't remember the last time someone told me a joke," says Hughes, a Nova 100 presenter and panellist on ABC TV's The Glass House, who wonders what's become of them. "They're certainly not part of any modern-day stand-up comedian's act."

Sure, you could scare up some if you whipped the bushes in their natural habitats (such as pubs, boozy business lunches, building sites and even primary-school playgrounds, which are the spiritual home of the L-plater of jokes, the painfully lame "knock-knock" variety). But out in the open their numbers have thinned noticeably.

"The only place I seem to see jokes," says satirist Chris Taylor from CNNNN and Triple J, "is on email, Christmas crackers, in the opening paragraph of bad wedding speeches and when disasters happen. After the Challenger space-shuttle crash, for example, the black-humoured jokes crept out and, without attribution - maybe they were started by American radio jocks - they spread very quickly."

If, indeed, the verbal joke is on the wane, you would have to suspect it has much to do with the emergence, in the past decade or so, of political correctness and the internet. While co-editors Phillip Adams and Patrice Newell noted, in the forward to their 1994 collection, The Penguin Book Of Australian Jokes, that humour is "a method of ameliorating mortality's bleak implications" - hence Challenger jokes, Azaria Chamberlain jokes and so on - they acknowledged the often appalling nature of their own collection. (Adams, incidentally, is a conduit for his jokes, not the source. "I don't tend to congregate in places where jokes are told," says the broadcaster, writer and filmmaker. And Sydney's ABC building, one of the few places he does go, "is a particularly humourless place".)

"Almost without exception," he and Newell write, jokes "deal in bigotry, sexism, racism, ageism and all the other politically incorrect isms. They clearly help people deal with their deep distaste for their own sexuality, their excremental functions, their foreign neighbours, their political masters and an infinite variety of things that go bump in the night... Indeed, apart from jokes involving innocent plays on words, almost every genre is fundamentally an act of verbal aggression against a fear of an enemy, be it defiantly targeted or dimly perceived."

So holding court with an Irish joke or a Jewish joke or an Aboriginal joke or even a blonde joke - something Chris Taylor says was common when he was growing up - may not necessarily be met with acceptance these days. Which is where the internet comes in. Every joke ever invented or reinvented (such as the blonde jokes that have been transformed into David Beckham jokes) has found a home on the internet.

While someone may be uncomfortable telling a spurious joke in person, there's more anonymity and protection afforded by email. "They are almost like chain letters," says Taylor.

So with the internet acting as an open-plains zoo, is the oral joke going the way of the dodo? And does anyone care? "I would not mourn the death of the joke," says comedian James O'Loghlin. "There's nothing particularly creative about them. It's someone else's humour. I much prefer it when people have their own funny stories and observations. The way I see it, a home-cooked meal is much better than takeaway."

Going by the infiltration of stand-up comedians and humorists into our media, the broad public join him in preferring observational humour and the comic anecdote to the formality of jokes. As The

Age columnist Sian Prior pointed out recently, "Comedians are taking over the airwaves, jokesmiths have conquered our TV screens and there's no escape."

At the moment, comedians Dave Hughes, Dave O'Neil, Wil Anderson, Mick Molloy, Merrick Watts and Tim Ross (aka Merrick and Rosso), to name but a few, all have a home on radio. And it's not just commercial stations signing up comics. Even Melbourne's comparatively sober 774 ABC decided to usher Red Symons into the breakfast host's

seat, much to the chagrin of traditionalists who don't like sardonic comments with their cornflakes.

On television, it's the same. Aside from obvious humour-based shows such as The Glass House, The Panel and Rove Live, we can find Paul McDermott hosting a show about ballroom dancing (Strictly Dancing), Peter Berner hosting quiz show The Einstein Factor and O'Loghlin hosting The New Inventors.

"I've certainly benefited from this trend towards observational humour," says O'Loghlin, who also hosts 702 ABC's Sydney evening program. "I suppose there was a time when, generally speaking, we had comedy shows and serious programs very much kept apart. But we don't do that with our lives. We don't divide them into serious and funny. You'll see people in business meetings, for example, injecting humour. It seems more natural."

So just because the joke may be dying doesn't mean we're losing our sense of humour. If anything, we're perhaps losing our sense of seriousness. "Is it," wondered Prior, "another symptom of our chronic, low-level anti-intellectualism ... are we laughing as hard as we can because if we didn't, we'd be weeping into our beers?"

I don't know about that - it sounds way too serious - so how about I tell you about my dog who I found the other day playing poker with my friends. "Isn't it amazing," I said, "a dog playing poker?" One of my mates looked up and said, "Aw, I dunno, every time he gets a good hand, he wags his tail." Boom. Tish.

[unfrufru]

yeah i read that on the weekend. i wanna know when was the last time this guy went to a comedy gig or a pub with mates (if he has any). telling jokes in that form is not dead.

but of course we've moved on. take my wife please is so last century. are we expected to ask why the chicken crossed the road for eternity?

[kebab_oner]

how many times are newspapers going to print what is basically the SAME ARTICLE?

"comedy is booming, there's comics on tv and radio".

yeah derr! we know. we read it in the paper a year and a half ago.

[Mythor]

I think political correctness has a lot to do with the decline of that style of joking. You can get done for sexual harassment for telling lewd jokes around the office if some twit (usually women, sorry but it's true) takes offense and dobs you in. So we seem to need it more "at a distance". TV, radio, stand-up and so forth are all of the nature where you can just get up and leave, change the channel and not have anything to do with the person you find offensive anymore.
In an office environment, you can't just walk away, so people tend to do more than just walk out on the show. So it's a cycle of noone wants to tell jokes in case someone takes offense and noone knows what people might get offended by because they don't tell jokes.

Wish I had the motivation to start my jokes mailing list again. *snigger*

[SR]

Oh, it's definitely PC that's killing jokes. I mean, making them up certainly hasn't stopped - shit, we'd made up a whole bunch within hours of September 11 [and some were RILLY funny] - often making up black-humour jokes is peoples way of dealing with the shit in the world.

[unfrufru]

hehe we're encouraged to tell dirty jokes, ruder the better.

at least now my talent is being used for good instead of evil

[op shop girl]

Originally Posted by Mythor

Wish I had the motivation to start my jokes mailing list again. *snigger*

hehehe, I remember that. I think I got about three efore the jokes mysteriously stopped arriving...