No Jokes.

We have often talked about how nobody tells jokes these days.
With all the best jokes being forwarded back and forth on social media there doesn't appear to be any place for the face to face telling of jokes.

There doesn't seem to be any need for the face to face, anything.

This casualty of the way our technology has moulded our society has cost us something,  that we didn't know we were losing until it was gone.

The act of remembering jokes and the perfect timing required to hit the punch line, just so, is a skill that pretty much most of us had. The thrill of the well-timed story and the audience's reaction was the best celebration of life in its highest form. We were all really adept and remembering a delivering the perfectly timed punchline.

It's not entirely gone, just evolved into a non-verbal skill. Quicker fingers and the ability to find the right joke stored on your device or the Web is the measure of a good entertainer.
These days a lot more good jokes come our way. Well written and perfectly timed, it's a solitary art.

How often do you laugh till your lungs hurt?

Till you feel you need to stop, or actually blow a gasket, or pee in your pants?

Wake up the next morning with sore tender ribs and diaphragm from the night before.

I thought not.

The great jokes will never die.
But the art of joke telling is a dying art.

Even those of us who loved to tell jokes to entertain the crowd can't tell 5 jokes in a row anymore.

And that I think is one of the casualties of the technologies we embraced.

Collateral damage that we accept.
M Parak.
Somewhere high above the Nile.
En route home from Dubai 2015.