I realize that humor continues to change and evolve over the years, at least to some extent. The real innovators and comedy giants hold a sort of timeless quality that remains relatively undiluted over the passing decades, but there seem to be different half-lives for each medium. Sanford and Son, for example (bweh-bweh-BWEH-NEH!) is just as funny to me now as I’ll wager it ever was back in the day. Same goes for Night Court, Cheers, and All in the Family. Sure, some of the jokes are dated, like Fred Sanford making some jibe concerning Nixon’s trustworthiness, or Dan Fielding making us all remember just how nicely the sexual revolution was humming along before AIDS went and ruined everyone’s sticky party, but by and large classic TV shows stand the test of time.
One step down from that we have stand-up comedy. Stand-up doesn’t hold water quite as well. By its very nature stand-up can be somewhat transitory, because once the public has heard a certain type of joke you can’t get away with it anymore. We don’t want to hear about how they should make the entire airplane out of the “black box” material anymore, thank you very much. That little gem was funny for about 3 minutes back in 1981. Once again, though, the giants of the genre stick with us. Classic Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Eddie Murphy before he decided he didn’t want to be funny anymore; their performances from the past are all still wicked hilarious. But it hasn’t all aged like fine wine. Sometimes late at night on HBO they will show stand-up from the eighties and…wow. Just…I find it hard to believe comedy survived at all. I seem to recall thinking there was a lot of funny stand-up back then, and I realize now that it’s because all the jokes that were original and fresh have since been sodomized and rammed directly into the repetitive ground. Even some of Seinfeld’s old stuff is pretty hard to take, ladies and gentlemen.Then, at the bottom of the stack, we have newspaper comic strips. Near as I can tell these are the humor equivalent of a cup of mayonnaise sitting in the sun, because that’s about how long they stay fresh before turning into something that looks like a venereal disease. The following are a few old classics ranging from the turn of the 20th century to about 1925. If any of you can make sense of this one, I’ll give you $100:
(If pics don’t come up, click here.)
Seriously; I don’t have a fucking clue what that means.
This next one has dialogue which is pretty unreadable, but I’ll give you the rundown, which you can probably guess from the illustration anyway. This one makes sense, in a twisted sort of “I’m a psychopath” way, but it leaves you wondering why anyone thought it was a worthy subject for a newspaper strip.
I suppose you can blame this one on being made in an era when to even see a woman’s ankle was considered pornography. The man who looks curiously like our current president is introducing his wife to a business associate. It turns out his wife and the fellow have met before and have just oodles of things to talk about. Apparently the husband is either drunk or Bobby Brown, because he gets steamed over being ignored and hits the dude in the head with a fucking stool. Like you do… I love the fact that this strip is called “Say!! Did This Ever Happen To You??” Just the other night, in fact.
Sticking with the theme that women are really just a cum-dumpster that occasionally has the annoying habit of speaking and going out in public, I present the following:
Yeah, man! Women are fucking dumb. Dames don’t get funny stories; let’s pay ‘em 40% of what we make and not listen to them! Ah, the good old days.
Here’s another one I just don’t get at all, though I do like the artwork:
If you can't read it, here's the gist: We have here 6 panels of two men discussing how the one on the right learned to toss a cigar into his mouth. That's it. Am I just missing something here? Was there something inherently funny about either cigars or anti-gravity tricks back in the roaring 20’s? Were our great grandparents just kind of simple? I suppose all the bathtub gin and phamaldahide-laced whiskey could be to blame.
Delightful sexism and random violence aside, this stuff is like Family Circus-level un-funny. Then again, even the awesomest of newspaper comic strips is a pretty low-bar form of humor. It’s just not that easy to translate balls-to-the-wall hilarity into four tiny black and white squares on low-quality paper. Clearly Doonesbury, Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes are exempt from this ruling.
Bonus: Awesome Advert
This is high in the running for my favorite liquor ad ever.
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