Funny Business -- Horse Goes Into A Bar; Bartender Says, `Hey, Why The Long Face?'

IF YOU GOT THAT punch line, it may say something about humor in America. Across the decades, the transformation of America's jokes has mirrored changes in America's soul.

Did you hear the joke about the iceman? Like other icemen, Tony was a randy young deceiver "whom a husband could not trust any farther than he could throw an ice box." One day, a young housewife went to her window, opened it and called out, "Hello, Tony! Do you have the time?" Tony beamed. "Yes," he called back, "if I can finda somebody holda my horses."

Imagine how this knee slapper of exactly 100 years ago, with its iceman, housewife and amateur Italian accent, would go over today. Now imagine how the Pilgrims, say, would react to this joke: A car clips off the open door of a yuppie's BMW. When the police arrive, the yuppie whines, "Look what happened to my Bimmer." "You yuppies make me sick," the policeman says. "You're so worried about your car, you didn't notice your left arm was ripped off." "Damn," says the yuppie, "where's my Rolex?"

Unbroken record

The transformation of America's jokes - from iceman to yuppie, burlesque to grotesque, beaming to whining - mirrors the changes in America's soul from its earliest days. Because jokes usually spring from a timely mood or event, they produce one of the few uninterrupted records of this nation's expectations and anxieties. The record shows the evolution of a people from innocent, hopeful, rural and God-fearing to plugged-in, ironic, inward-looking and dripping with ennui.

"Everybody's a wisenheimer today," says Mark O'Donnell, a humorist who recently adapted Moliere's "Les Fourberies de Scapin" for Broadway. "You can live out on the farm and still be jaded. It used to be the circus had to come to town. Now you have the circus 24 hours a day."

Robert Thompson, professor of television and film at Syracuse University, agrees. "At the latter part of this century, to get someone to laugh has become a very complicated process. It's a kind of been-there, done-that phenomenon."

Two trends have dominated American humor in recent years: disaster jokes and "attitude." Jokes cycles come and go, and in the 20th century, Americans have yukked their way through such memorable phases as little moron, knock-knock, Helen Keller, Polish and elephant jokes. Joke scholars say jokes, like dreams, reflect a larger national preoccupation.

Grammar of humor

The disaster-joke cycle began around the time of the Challenger explosion in 1986: "What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts." Although disaster jokes seem cruel and tasteless, humorists say they vent people's frustrations over the gap between high expectations and tragic reality.

Around the same time, American humor began to be overrun by "attitude" comedians like David Letterman and other smart-alecky late-night hosts. "In the 1980s and '90s, irony began to replace the joke as the basic grammar of humor," Thompson says. "Just the fact that they're wise guys is funny. And it may be funny; but it's banter, not jokes." Many humorists thought the change set humor back. "It's a lot easier to take a shot than it is to create the scenario of a joke," says John Buskin, a humor writer.

Now some humorists believe America may be coming out of its disaster and attitude funk and finding humor not in the cruelty of Andrew Dice Clay or Sam Kinison, or the profanity of George Carlin or Richard Pryor, but in reality-based comedy - the everyday goofiness of Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen Degeneres, Tim Allen and Drew Carey. "As a performer, reality-based comedy is funnier to me," says Beth Lapides, a comedian and founder of a Los Angeles comedy show called Un-Cabaret. "It used to be you had to be one-dimensional, like, `I'm the fat one, I'm the black one, I'm the woman.' And you had to do material about this one thing that made you freaky."

Seven-second challenge

In comedy clubs, Lapides says, you were considered a failure if you didn't get a laugh every seven seconds. "Then if you said one word with the wrong emphasis or added an extra `the,' you threw off the whole joke," she says. "There are too many interesting things in the world to be bothered by that."

While reality-based humor tends to be kinder and gentler than its immediate predecessors, some humorists wonder whether the shift from looking outward to looking inward for humor isn't inherently limited. Humor of early America almost always consisted of little stories about someone else - the preacher, the rabbi, the newlyweds, the Scotsman, the bachelor. "The humor I see on television and in the clubs today is the humor of the narcissist," says Joseph Dorinson, a student of humor and professor of history at Long Island University. "The humor is of trivia, of people engaged in lives of little substance and less social significance."

If humor is enjoying a renaissance now, it owes much to the Internet and its cheap, speedy global communication. On the World Wide Web today, you can find more jokes in one day than a 19th-century American would hear in his entire life. (Not surprisingly, many of them are about technology: "A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and a computer-software engineer were riding in a car when it broke down. `It's probably a valve,' said the mechanical engineer. `It's probably a spark plug,' said the electrical engineer. `I know,' said the computer-software engineer, `let's all get out of the car and get back in again.' ")

Buying more comedy

Indeed, humorists say Americans have never enjoyed, needed and bought comedy the way they do today. Comedy Central and other cable channels offer showcases for lesser-known comedians, and Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" has just made the leap from cable to network TV. The movie industry has claimed Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase. Children's television is a cornucopia of imaginative humor; "Rugrats" was the No. 1 cable television show last year. The comics have been reinvigorated by Dilbert, the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. Comedy clubs are bustling. "We're on an upswing big-time," says Louis Faranda, entertainment director for Caroline's, a New York comedy club. "There's such a frenzy to find the next Jerry Seinfeld."

Behind the humor boom, as behind every joke, is a sad reality: Humor is one of the few tools Americans can use to mend their fraying national fabric. "There's a whole rise today of the comedian as a shaman," says Joseph Boskin, professor of history at Boston University. "Like shamans in ancient society, they understand fissures and try to heal them. In a society as diverse and conflicted as this one is, two things bring Americans together: popular music and popular humor."

The huge appetite for television comedy means that professional comedy writers are enjoying a very low unemployment rate. But humorists continue to be surprised by how many jokes arise from the general populace. People who have time on their hands - prisoners, people in bars and Wall Street traders between trades - are believed to be major contributors to the joke pool. But now students of humor describe a phenomenon they have never seen before - spontaneous combustion, in which the same joke is created by many people at the same moment. "The year the current pope was elected, overnight there was a new genre of joke created, the Polish Pope joke," says Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. "I immediately set to making some of them up, and I became aware that the same joke was being made up in more than one place at the same time."

Financial world fertile

Jokes still play an important part in the discourse of the financial markets, where the sober business of making money is lubricated by fast, topical jokes. "If you're going to be perceived as a great salesman, proving you have information first is really important," says a trader at a small securities firm. "If someone calls you up and starts a joke, and you can finish it, you have the edge. It proves you're plugged in."

One drawback to the abundance of jokes on-line is that, "in general, most jokes aren't much good, so now there are a lot more bad jokes floating around," Cohen says. Another is that with so much humor zipping around so rapidly, people doing traditional comedy find it increasingly difficult to shock audiences. "If you listen to Lenny Bruce 30 years ago, that was so outrageous it got him arrested; now you hear that stuff on television," says Buskin. "The edge has to keep moving - it's like inflation. At some point, you're going to be opening people's stomachs up and pulling out their guts for a laugh."

Although it's hard to imagine what the Cro-Magnon man may have joked about, he certainly did. Humor is ageless, universal and uniquely human. Some early cave drawings were probably parodies of other cave drawings, and "when Attila the Hun's army saw someone get his head chopped off in a particularly grisly way, they probably told jokes about it," Thompson says. In the Middle Ages, wrote P.G. Wodehouse, "the well-to-do thought nothing so funny as a man who was considerably shorter than they were . . . Anyone in those days who was 50 inches tall or less was per se a humorist."

Shakespeare had Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, Italians had their commedia dell'arte. Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton probably had wise-cracking counterparts in ancient Rome - "two blue-collar guys who repaired the aqueduct," Buskin says.

But humor found particularly rich soil in the diversity and democracy of America. Joke scholars believe that Pilgrims told jokes, though as religious zealots scratching to survive, they probably didn't spend a lot of time on it. What's the difference between Pilgrim jokes and jokes today? "Most of our jokes these days don't include the word `ye' in them," says Charlie Kadau, associate editor of the 45-year-old Mad magazine. "There would be virtually no point of reference for them. We're doing material about America Online, working mothers and body piercing."

Slaves certainly told jokes, Dorinson says, although they were well-couched in double entendre. Lyceums, chautauquas and vaudeville began creating a national humor long before radio and television finished the job. And despite the enormous changes in American culture over the past century, some subjects and techniques of those early humorists have survived. Drunks, lawyers, marriage and negotiations at the pearly gates still provide opportunities for jokesters. ("Three doctors were trying to get through the pearly gates. The first, a pediatrician, was warmly welcomed. The second, a cancer specialist, was similarly received. `What do you do?' St. Peter asked the third. `I work for an HMO,' the doctor said. St. Peter tapped something into his computer, then looked up. `OK,' he said, `you can come in, but you have to leave after three days.' ")

A staple of humor in this nation of immigrants has been the ethnic joke, and despite the mighty forces of political correctness, that remains true today. The difference is that people now are more selective about whom they share racist or sexist jokes with. Another change is that groups that have long been the butts of such humor now create retaliatory jokes. The Internet, for example, is teeming with dumb-blonde jokes: "What's the difference between a blonde and a computer? You only have to punch information into a computer once." But now there is also this kind of joke: "What's the difference between a man and a catfish? One is a bottom-feeding scum-sucker, and one is a fish."

Some people believe the direction of modern humor owes much to the greater influence on, and opportunity for, women in comedy. "From the moment I started doing stand-up, the women who were successful were trying to be as good as men, trying to tell tough jokes like men," says Merrill Markoe, a comedian and humor writer. "Reality-based comedy is more user-friendly to women, because women find more humor in the details of life than in the big slam-dunk punch line about two guys in a bar."

Whether the jokes are about Charlemagne or O.J. Simpson, humor is no less than an oral history of mankind. But what exactly is mankind? "Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself," writes humorist Jack Handey. "Basically, it's made up of two words - `mank' and `ind.' What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind."