>>22 I'm not hung up on it, I just thought that was the most interesting part of your post. I wasn't saying it for you to care about it, it was just an observation of an interesting modern phenomenon, related to the topic. Sorry but the rest sounds like hogwash to me. What timescale are you talking about? It simply isn't the case that at some point in history, jokes were all long, and now they're short. There are examples of long and short jokes from Victorian times, medieval times, as far back as the oldest recorded Sumerian jokes. How can a joke become rare? There are lots of modern comedians telling long-form jokes. Why's it only a good joke if it takes time to tell with a long build up? I'm not disputing they can be very funny, but that's just one kind of comedy.