I realised that young people have no conception of telling jokes when one of our children revealed that they didn’t know, or couldn’t recall, the riposte to: ‘A horse walked into a bar…’ The old joke was still well-known enough just 12 years ago for David Grossman, an Israeli novelist, to use it as the title of his Booker-winner tragi-comedy about an erratic stand-up. But now – forget about it. The discovery left me long in the face.
Gen Z simply doesn’t know what jokes are
Older Millennials were born just about in time to catch the tail end of joke telling, an oral tradition that stretches back to prehistory. But Gen Z simply doesn’t know what jokes are. It’s odd, because they spend so much of their time scrolling TikTok or Instagram to watch other people talking about random things in short bursts, a format that would work perfectly for joke telling. But it hasn’t seeded there. Jokes are too analogue.
Sitting with this discovery was a parallel realisation: I no longer tell jokes myself. And nor does anyone else. I don’t think I have done so in over ten years. ‘Pedro the boat-builder’ (punchline: ‘But I f*** one pig…’) was the last one I told with any regularity. I think I liked it because of the jarring proximity of pathos to bestiality. The most recent joke that I recall learning – the deflated infant balloon who had let his dad down, his mum down and most of all himself down – must have been circa 2010. In the digital age, memorised, formally structured jokes have gone the way of all other oral traditions.
