Most jokes are not funny. Comedy is observational. When the subject under observation changes, a joke ages like fine milk. The stand-up only cracks wise in the present. The secret of comedy is time.
The oldest recorded joke may be a Sumerian proverb dating to somewhere around 2000 BCE: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” You had to be there.
Even if you were there, the first Biblical joke falls flat. When God told Sarah she was pregnant at age 90, she “laughed to herself.” This is the first recorded response to a joke that isn’t funny.
Plato noted that changes in musical taste predict changes in political arrangements. The same goes for America’s sense of humor. Something was shifting in American comedy in the 1960s and 1970s, and sometime around 1980 it changed for good, or at least forever. The political symbol of this change was the election of Ronald Reagan. But the mentality of the professional merrymaker altered years before Bonzo’s gag-feeder ascended to the White House.
