Old jokes
These remind me of a category of "joke" that some of my middle-school peers and I engaged in: the non-joke. The only one I can remember went something like: a man walks into a bakery and asks for two baguettes. The baker looks at him, thinks for a moment and says "It's OK, you can leave your bike outside".Looking back, I think this idea was somehow rooted in the idea that jokes have delivery 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 "plant" in the school yard that would start the laughter, sometimes it would catch even for these non-jokes.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 "say anything the right way and people laugh". However, "the right way" for standup is very different than the "telling a joke" structure.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 that's what make it poetry.