Old jokes
These remind me of a category of &quot;joke&quot; that some of my middle-school peers and I engaged in: the non-joke. The only one I can remember went something like: <i>a man walks into a bakery and asks for two baguettes. The baker looks at him, thinks for a moment and says &quot;It&#x27;s OK, you can leave your bike outside&quot;</i>.<p>Looking back, I think this idea was somehow rooted in the idea that jokes have <i>delivery</i> and that if you use that delivery (rythmn, emphasis, body language) maybe you could say anything and be funny. There was also the peer effect - if you had an audience &quot;plant&quot; in the school yard that would start the laughter, sometimes it would catch even for these non-jokes.<p>Decades later, the idea I described above seems both obviously false, but also true, in the sense that a lot of modern stand up is based on &quot;say anything the right way and people laugh&quot;. However, &quot;the right way&quot; for standup is very different than the &quot;telling a joke&quot; structure.<p>On the other hand, it does feel to me at this point that this is the crux of the contemporary poetry slam: read an arbitrary text in the right way, and while it may not win any prizes, it will feel like poetry, because <i>that&#x27;s what make it poetry</i>.