A few years back now, while stilling living in the Ipswich, I happened to be in a church service listening to a man appropriate Peter Kay's digestive biscuit sketch as an illustration. I remember looking at the folk next to me in horror, as we all realised that this man had no real sense of humour and was just stealing other people's jokes. I imagine we probably went to the pub afterwards1 and did exactly the same with jokes from the Simpsons, or Malcolm in the Middle, or that bit about the Superman having a kid with Lois Lane that's in one of those Kevin Smith films.
The reason I say this is because it has recently dawned on me that people have probably always done this, so folk back in the days of Shakespeare would be found in pubs and taverns doing impressions of Bottom or Trinculo and Stephano, and before then people probably hung around bath houses and tavernas repeating jokes Caesar2 made. So shortly after Moses came down from mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments you'd find people kicking around their tents going "have you ever thought about what your top ten commandments would be, only if I had to do it, I'd so be putting coveting at the end." And then people would say LOL, only it wouldn't have been invented yet, so they might actually laugh. And then they might get stoned3.
Of course, I say all this knowing full well that I made this observation in a pub with someone else, and he probably heard it from someone else in a pub too, and it probably turns out it's originally a famous sketch, but constant chinese-whispering has diluted it of all humour.
1 Actually, I'm certain we did. It was The Black Horse, and we decided to start attending The Royal George's pub quiz regularly; what a fateful night that was.
2 Augustus, the rest never really said anything funny, apart from Nero once, but that was unintentionally funny and repeating it in a bath house was probably a sure fire way of being flayed alive by a lobster.
3 Someone's else joke.
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