From senadorvasa @ wordpress

A Rhose, by Any Other Name is a rather old article written by an ex-pat about the odd (odd for him, anyway) names given to many Filipinos. I remember reading it not on the Internet but on paper… which is really weird now that I think about it. Back when I first read it, I really found it funny and if for some reason you haven’t read it yet, you should do it right after you finish this one. :p

Being in a nostalgic mood, I decided to google the article. This led me to Pinoy Jokes, a website which I had already visited several years ago. After re-reading the article I went on to browse through the other portions of the site. It was chock-full of really old jokes, the kind of jokes that I’ve heard over and over again through television, text messages, class clowns, office clowns, and even priests who try to be funny in sermons. Still remember your Erap jokes? Well, there’s an abundance of them in the website.

After reading a dozen jokes, some I haven’t really heard before, I didn’t find myself laughing as much as I had hoped. Maybe it was the way they were written, but the jokes just felt so old, even the ones labeled “new”. I can almost smell what ten years ago smelled like, back when my idea of Internet fun was to look for “Jokes” or “Funny Stories” on search engines like Yahoo!, Altavista, or Ask Jeeves.

Nowadays, a single picture from Failblog can generate as much laughter as a five-minute read through the website. A very short clip showing a sneezing panda can send a person “rolling on the floor laughing” (if the comments are to be believed literally). We seem to have gotten more efficient in making ourselves laugh. Are we laughing more because they are funnier? Or is our laughter becoming cheaper? Or maybe humor just evolves, naturally differentiating generations from each other?