“You better get that pit bull outta here,” says the first fellow.
“Oh yeah, I’m real scared,” says the pit bull owner.
“You’d better control that dog,” the first guy warns.
The pit bull owner laughs, lets loose of his dog’s leash, and the pit bull jumps into the little yellow dog with no tail — and chomp! the little yellow dog with no tail bites off the pit bull’s head.
“My lord,” says the pit bull owner, “what kind of dog is that?”
“Well,” says the first guy, “before I cut his tail off and painted him yellow, he was an alligator.”
Heard any good jokes lately? I haven’t. I had to hark back to 1962 when pimply John Hanna told me the above joke outside the gym at the high school. It’s perfectly usable even now and only offends 50,000,000 people, far fewer than most jokes these days.
For most of my life, jokes have been an essential part of life on the planet. I heard them when I was a twerp in elementary school: “Did you hear about the Indian who drank a hundred cups of tea? They found him dead in his tepee.” When I was a junior high school jerk: “Did you hear about the Japanese prostitute who starved to death? Nobody had a yen for her.” And when I was a testosteronic moron in high school: “There was this traveling salesman who stopped at a farmer’s house ... ”
I remember World War II jokes about General Eisenhower and his female driver, jokes about D.C. prostitutes and the Nixon-Kennedy election, sick jokes about the Helen Keller doll. And blond jokes, peg-leg hog jokes, scatological jokes galore, philosophical hitchhiker jokes, etc.
Back in the early ’60s, when ethnic humor was not yet tantamount to a hate crime, Steve Allen told a Polish joke on live TV. The next night he introduced a lawyer who claimed he represented the Polish Anti-Defamation League. The lawyer was obviously offended, so Allen agreed to tell an ethnic joke using another nationality. And just to keep it on the up and up, he promised to have someone in the audience supply the punch line.
“OK,” Allen said, “how many Swedes does it take to paint a house?” A member of the audience jumped up and yelled “One!” A puzzled look came over Allen’s face. “One?” he asked. “Yeah,” said the guy in the audience. “One Swede to hold the paint brush and a thousand Polish people to move the house back and forth.” It was a setup, of course, but I later read in TV Guide that it was the longest laugh ever recorded on live TV.
I’ve always had a weakness for great one-liners of the take-my-wife-please variety. A few years ago when the “Titanic” movie was all the snazz, I got a big kick out of a friend who’d blurt out in utter amazement, “It hit an iceberg!?” every time someone mentioned the fate of the great ocean liner.
But, alas, that was the last good joke. I haven’t heard one worth remembering in years. In fact, jokes began to disappear during the Clinton administration, and they are almost non-existent these days — not that I’m blaming our present dearth of humor on Clinton or Bush, though they both have done their fair share to keep us straight faced — except, of course, for the belly laugh Dubya supplied when he stood grinning on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, looking exactly like Alfred E. Newman in a flight suit.
Anyway, I have a couple of possible explanations for the disappearance of the joke as a literary form. First, we might just be joked out. Except for topical humor, we may have exhausted all the possible joke motifs.
Second, we might be suffering from joke fatigue, what with the hundreds of stupid jokes that appear in our e-mail inboxes each morning, forwarded by acquaintances who lack the talent and/or energy to tell us the jokes face to face.
Third, every kind of dirty joke you can think of is already on TV. Why waste your time telling a joke to someone who heard it on a sitcom last night?
And last, it’s damn dangerous telling jokes these days. You never know when you’ll run into a little yellow dog with no tail — and chomp!
Stephen Smith is a professor of English at Sandhills Community College. He can be reached via e-mail at travisses@hotmail.com.
