The best line in the entire 10 seasons of E4’s visual wallpaper/time filler, Friends, is when Chandler makes a weak pun on something or other and Joey says something like, “dude, that is some gentle comedy.”
The ‘Seinfeld for girls’ was pretty gentle itself, it was sickly, colour-saturated comfort food for the lazy, self involved, therapy-savvy generation. It’s so deeply undemanding that watching it feels like having your temples massaged while stroking a Labrador puppy, while another Labrador puppy licks your balls.
But that show – and any show for 15 years before it - never had the very basis of gentle comedy: the anecdotal, line ‘em up ‘n’ knock ‘em down punch line focused joke.
The alternative comedy of the late 70s and early 80s (really just comedy by people who weren’t fat, bald and wearing a tuxedo) put pay to the variety show style of stand up, which basically was the aforementioned style of joke, told by an old guy with heart problems standing in front of a show band.
Jokes became unfashionable, and the last two generations haven’t really had any new gags spread around (although if you get the Sickipedia app for your iPhone you’ll find that’s not entirely true- Maddie McCann has had every possible aspect of her life turned into something fantastically funny). Now we have Peep Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is fantastic, but what if one day we get old and want to return to the kind of gags our elderly relatives told at family get togethers?
Lucky for us, some guys called Sam Hoffman, Tim Williams and Eric Spiegelman have been making videos of old people from the funniest race – the Jews, in case you didn’t know - telling jokes that only old guys tell. From the innocent to the extremely unpleasant, they’re all told with the gentle, friendly lilt that old people are known for.
They put all these videos on the internet, they called the site Oldjewstellingjokes.com and it’s adorable. If you learn a few of them before you have to do community service at an old people’s home for urinating on a war memorial, you’ll be the toast of Shady Oaks Retirement Village…
Here’s a few recent gags: