A Funny Thing Happened Between a Rock and a Hard Place

No, seriously...

Feature article from the Fall 2023 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Timothy Deenihan

What do you call a sleepwalking nun? A Roamin' Catholic.

Growing up, long ago, back when I had hair and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, it seemed everyone I knew, young or old, had a mental Rolodex of jokes to share, organized by content and their appropriateness––or inappropriateness––for any given situation or audience. Kids traded “mom jokes” on the playground as ribbing insults at best friends. Teens told their worst “dad jokes,” commiserating over the awkwardness of parents.

Admittedly, there were plenty that relied on racial or cultural stereotypes, but often enough, those jokes were told by members of the very race or culture in question. My best friend was of Polish descent and never arrived at our door without a “Pollock” joke to share with my parents. My own catalogue of Irish jokes borders on limitless.

Why don’t we hear them anymore?

It isn’t that we’ve lost our sense of humor. Countless memes and short vids fill social media accounts with puns, one-liners, pranks and witty observations on the absurdity of life. Streaming services have categories dedicated to stand-up comedy, sit-coms and comedic films. Even the action movie series that was arguably the greatest cinematic juggernaut of the last two decades, Marvel’s Avengers, was as well known and loved for its comedy as for its action, special effects or story. There’s plenty of humor going around.

Just not that many jokes.

Some blame cancel culture, but I’m not buying it. There may be some jokes that aren’t told as freely anymore, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Empathy and humor are not mutually exclusive, and if the only jokes you know are those that come at another’s expense, then there are larger issues to address.

But more to the point, joke-telling’s decline long predates cancel culture, or political correctness, or whatever term may be used to dismissively deride intentional empathy. In May of 2005, the New York Times published an article titled “Seriously, the Joke Is Dead.” Nearly a decade before that, during the April 27, 1996, broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, show host Garrison Keillor sang, “People don’t tell jokes the way they used to / I used to hear jokes all the time / I heard ’em at the barber, from the waitress at the café / I never hear ’em now, I don’t know why.” To right the wrong, what followed was two hours of jokes of every kind–– long-winded tales building anticipation of a killer punchline, old-school knock-knock jokes, lawyer jokes and rapid-fire how-many-[blanks]-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb jokes. The show was so successful, the format was repeated annually 13 times.

What's Forrest Gump's Wi-Fi password? 1forrest1

There’s no doubt people love a good joke. My fear is that jokes are headed the same way as the dodo, local print news and handwritten directions on how to get from point A to point B. Humans are ace at ruining a good thing.

I have my suspicions about what’s going on.

For a start, laughter is a scary business––just ask anyone who does it professionally. And look at the words they use for a weak performance. A bad comic doesn’t “fail.” They die on stage. They bomb. Catastrophic words for the simple shortcoming of just not being funny enough. If that’s what happens to the professionals, what hope do we mere mortals have?

And so, as with all things that are difficult or scary, we let someone else do it for us. Everyone has heard someone say, “I can’t tell a joke,” or “I always ruin a punchline.” Social media absolves us of those concerns––not only of getting the joke right, but of the joke even being funny in the first place. Like it or not, laugh or not, it’s someone else’s humor.

But it’s not just humor that’s gone digital. We text more than we call. We email way more than we write. Those superficial but oh-so-important status checks that once happened on front porches and sidewalks now happen almost exclusively via Facebook and Instagram, if they happen at all. It’s not just that people don’t tell jokes the way they used to. People don’t talk the way they used to. There’s nothing personal about it.

And when you get right down to it, isn’t that the point of a joke? To connect person to person? To remind us that we’re human? What is telling a joke if not practicing humanity? Joke-telling exists only at the top of the food chain. Evolutionarily speaking, what does it accomplish? It builds no shelter, defends no fortress, feeds no stomach.

But it does remind us that we are a community. You must read social cues to tell a joke. Say, “A lawyer, a politician and a vampire walk into a bar …” and you will see your compatriot’s pupils dilate in anticipation of the punchline to come. Then, of course, there is something beautifully naked about sharing what you think is funny and hoping it doesn’t prove you a fool. It’s saying “I love you” with no certainty of an “I love you, too.” The practice is interactive in the most intensely present sense. That risk, with the shared reward of unguarded public laughter, is every bit as much an exercise in community as is the breaking of bread.

I don’t know which came first, the chicken who crossed the road or the egg that scrambled to ketchup––these days of division and distance or the silence where a good groaner used to reside––but I can’t help noticing the more out of practice we get with sitting and talking with people, with reading social cues, with risking ourselves even just a little, the more we lose of the best that makes us human.

Why do you never hear jokes about pizza? They're all too cheesy

The Mayo Clinic offers a long list of both the short-term and long-term benefits of laughter, including organ stimulation, lowered heart rate and blood pressure, muscle relaxation, the release of neuropeptides that aid the immune system, pain relief, endorphin release acting as a natural anti-anxiety and antidepressant response and––yes––improved social connectivity. So go ahead, learn and share a knock-knock joke or two.

And if you tell me the times are too dark for laughter, that the world is too heavy for the lightness of a joke, I say to you: Exactly my point.

Because laughter is more than just the best medicine. It’s an act of defiance, a statement of strength.

Christ’s teaching, “If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also,” isn’t so much about pacifism (or even passivism) as it is about courage––about meeting darkness with brazen faith in the light. What is gallows humor if not the comic equivalent? Freud offers the example of a man facing a firing squad, who is asked if he wants a final cigarette. “No, thanks,” the man replies. “I’m trying to quit.” When Life strikes you on the cheek, tell it a joke.

“Laughter sets the spirit free to move through even the most tragic circumstances,” writes Vietnam veteran and POW survivor Captain Gerald Coffee in his memoir Beyond Survival. “It helps us shake our heads clear, get our feet back under us and restore our sense of balance and purpose. Humor is integral to our peace of mind and ability to go beyond survival.”

And I think I know why. A 1989 study by the University of Maryland found that people are 30 times more likely to laugh in the company of others than they are alone. Laughter, it would seem, is not only a sign of personal strength. It is evidence, even if only subconsciously, of strength in numbers––that is, of community. Which is why, when Coffee’s captors kept their prisoners isolated in order to break their spirits, those prisoners would tap out jokes to each other in Morse code through the very walls that separated them.

Which reminds me: 

Knock-knock.

(Who's there?)

It is I.

You might have to trust me on this, but that last one slays at a Morse code convention.

The thing to understand is this: a joke is a story. And like all stories, whether real or imagined, factual or fictional, tragic or comic, they transport us. They lift us from our world to theirs––a vantage to be valued for even its briefest escape, or perspective, or both.

If the former, fair enough. Jokes that, in good times, provided a mere chuckle were, for Coffee and his fellow POWs, literal escape––if not physically and forever, then at least emotionally for the moment; and in those survival situations, the moment-to-moment is all you have.

For me, however, in the cushion of first-world comfort and observation, I love humor for its perspective. A joke works because of the element of surprise––the pun we didn’t anticipate, the punchline we expect least but appreciate most. As such, I can’t imagine a better thumbnail proxy for Life than a joke, nor a more succinct summary of Life’s absurdity than a punchline. As humor goes, that’s not always comfortable.

But then, neither is Life. And owning that fact, exercising the dexterity required to separate humor from horror, however disproportionate the ratios, is the flex of Life’s survivors. The condemned man who tells the firing squad he doesn’t want a cigarette because he’s trying to quit is someone commandeering complete emotional control of a situation. Firefighters and ER medics navigate their days relying on streaks of humor so dark they redefine the laws of gravity. Far from being a sign of callous insensitivity, humor––particularly when it seems least likely––is often a sign of indefatigable humanity.

We can turn this around. We can come back together. Even with practice it may take time to regain the courage to laugh (the secret to comedy is timing, after all). But as social networks prove themselves to be anything but, as the political arena feels more like a death match than democracy, as the darkness would have us believe it’s all there is, I would argue there is no better time than now to ask:

When does a dad joke become a dad joke? When the punchline is apparent.