One of the saddest bits of joke archaeology is running across fossils: jokes which were once alive and kicking, quivering with excitement at the laugh that would be forthcoming when the audience heard it for the eighty-third time. Sometimes they do not realize they have been told for the last time, and wait in books, unaware that the passage of time has left them irrelevant, inapplicable, and inert.
This melancholy image came to me as I was leafing through a paperback book published during the years of my childhood, its cover tattered, its pages slightly brown. The jokes inside, which dealt with the life of a teenager (something I could only dream of back in 19…why talk math?) The jokes, frankly, were still pretty current: high school drama, wardrobe worries, feeding one’s date on a limited budget…. And then I ran into a picture of the heroine sitting in a posture impossible past a certain age, all wrapped up in the telephone cord.
Telephone cord? I had to check the copyright date to make sure this wasn’t a nineteenth century collection.
And a few pages later came another jape from days of yore. The phone was ringing and she was running to pick it up before anyone else in the family could answer. Jokes which require footnotes lose their punch. Modern readers need to be reminded that phones were once tethered in one spot, and that the vast majority of homes had ONLY ONE PHONE.
Not always, of course. I thought with some sadness of the sitcoms where someone was talking secrets on the phone, and another member of the family quietly picked up the family’s Other Phone to listen in, since all the phones were on the same line. Try explaining THAT scene to a Personal Phone audience.
Is there a paradise somewhere for aged jokes which must be explained? There’d be a special wing for gags from bygone technological marvels, a massive auditorium for telephone jokes of the past. There we would find the jokes about rural conversations on a party line, now relegated to the primitive past with the crowd of scenes where the postman reads you all the postcards your relatives mailed today. (Postcard jokes are a whole nother blog.)
Who was the last strongman to show off his muscles by tearing a phonebook in half. Among the useless information stuck in my brain is a tip on how to make sure that massive collection of pages, bigger than the Spring/Summer Sears Roebuck catalog (don’t ask: go consult your grandmother. She’ll google it for you.) will be sure to come apart just right. Who is the last surviving soul among us who sat on a phone book come Thanksgiving?
Once upon a time, watching Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent pausing to stare at a phone kiosk which had replaced the handy old phone booths got a huge laugh from the audience. Does this still get so much as a chuckle in a crowd which doesn’t remember phone booths?
Pay phone jokes have gone the same way as phone booth funnies. No more will we see the pictures of the man fishing in the coin return for spare change, or the scribbled recommendation of a local CALL girl who scribbled “For a good time, call Iphigenia at 555….” Ah, enough of this. I shall go off by myself wind up my Victrola, and mourn as I play that sad old country song “They washed the wall of the men’s room stall and I can’t call my sweetheart no more.”
Blogsy Babbles 