WHAT’S NEW? NOT MUCH!

As the vehicles of humor have changed, so have the modes of its circulation. “A new joke,” Freud wrote in 1905, “is passed from one person to another like the news of the latest victory.”

Freud’s analogy is not altogether obsolete; a wave of jokes about changing light bulbs swept across North America like wildfire. Of course, e-mail, which is a relatively new phenomenon, allows us to circulate jokes with lightning speed and to distribute them worldwide. The only downside to that is…it seems there is no more new material. Almost every joke is something we have heard or seen before.