These last few days, I have been pondering one of the great mysteries of our times. And I can find no answers. So expect a lot of question marks in this column.Who the hell thinks up those jokes that friends send you via SMS or by mail, and which you then pass on to other friends? I don’t know anyone who has ever written a joke — and I know lots of genuinely funny people. A senior IPS friend of mine regularly texts me jokes, at least five or six every day. I asked him where he gets his jokes from. He said his boss sends them to him (I must admit I immediately had a fleeting vision of our top policemen spending their working day SMSing jokes to colleagues and falling off their chairs laughing while criminals ran riot on the streets). Who are these funny people who do this selfless anonymous social service, periodically letting loose a message on the airwaves that finds it way eventually to possibly millions of mobile phones and email boxes across the world? Who are these saints of the smile? What sort of persons would they be? And I am not talking here about stand-up comedians or your newspaper comic strip writers or the professional joke writers whose job is to think up jokes for American TV shows. I am talking about the jokes that you and I get in our mail and mobile phones. Some of them may be written by professionals, and someone enjoyed them so much that he wanted to share them with friends. But my guess would be that this would be a small percentage of the jokes that zoom through the ether every day. Most of them would have been created by people who are not paid jokesters but chaps in regular jobs who thought up a joke between balancing accounts or selling soap. The visual ones involving photographs would, of course, definitely be from people who work in some sort of design job, because they demand technical skill. But what is truly interesting to me is the anonymity part of it. Because I think it would be a rare jokeman who would send off his jokes to his pals with a “Hey, I just wrote this”. So even if his joke has the receivers in splits, they would never know that they have in their midst a comic genius. And the delivery system we are talking about is such that it is very possible that a few months later, the joke would come back to his mobile phone from someone. Does he then SMS back that it was he who is the original author? Or does he just feel a tiny warm glow inside him and a sense of accomplishment, that his joke has been widely appreciated? I may be quite wrong, but I would think the latter would be more true. Could these people be capable of writing longer funny pieces? Again, I am guessing, the answer is no, for most of them. Jokes are very different from humorous short stories or novels. I doubt whether P.G. Wodehouse could have written a joke. Much of Wodehouse’s humour derives from the plot, the language and the dialogue. It is situational comedy, not the pithy joke as we know it: “Q: What does an agnostic dyslexic insomniac do? A: Stay up all night and wonder if there’s a Dog.” The classic joke, in most cases, is short, precise, sharp, sometimes just one sentence (“Confucius say: Man who want pretty nurse, must be patient). If a Wodehouse novel is a stately manor filled with the sound of laughter, a joke is a brick thrown through someone’s glass window. Having pondered these extremely serious issues at length, I found myself confronted with even more basic questions: What are jokes anyway? How do they work? So I went to Wikipedia and discovered the following: among experts who have studied jokes are Kant, Bergson, Freud and Koestler (none of whom strike me as men with a great sense of humour). I was also informed that in 1975, anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that “Joking as one mode of expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of expression”; scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later this statement remains largely valid. Whatever that means, other than sounding very meaningful. And I doubt if our anonymous do-gooders would give two hoots about it.
