Charlie:
A point of comparison is Sarah Silverman.
If one of Sarah Silverman’s jokes is remembered 100 years from now, it will be: “I was raped by a doctor — which is bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”
You could probably give a whole seminar on joke-writing based on that joke, which has a lot going on in it — and which isn’t, if anybody cares to notice, actually a joke about rape. It is a joke about Jewish stereotypes, and it works because of the juxtaposition of the dark and serious with the light and corny. It’s a recursive joke, a joke that is a joke about jokes like itself.
Silverman doesn’t do the rapid-fire Borscht Belt delivery, but the rhythm and the shape of the joke is like something you could imagine being delivered by Rodney Dangerfield, while the content is something that couldn’t possibly be delivered by someone like that — which is part of why the joke is so memorable.
It reminds me of a very similar joke in an old Doonesbury in which a man dying of AIDS confesses on his deathbed that, contrary to what he told his mother, he didn’t get HIV from a mosquito bite: “The mosquito is six-foot-two,” he says. “He’s a radiologist.” To which his mother replies: “A doctor? You’re dating a doctor?”
Jimmy Carr practices a very old-fashioned, very traditional form of humor. But I suppose that if Henny Youngman showed up today joking about a swanky hotel with a “Persian rug made out of real Persians,” somebody would howl. And not with laughter.
In 20 years or so, when this moral panic has played itself out, the people who led the witch hunts are going to pretend like none of it ever happened. I expect that when that day comes, a very fit 75-year-old Joe Rogan will look back and laugh, but not without bitterness.
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