People love to blame the internet for "the death" of things (newspapers, music, social lives, grammar, etc., etc.). Those claims are rarely (if ever) accurate -- but at least you can sort of understand where they're coming from. However, this latest study makes almost no sense at all, claiming that the internet is killing the ability to tell jokes. According to the short blurb about the study, 40% of people would rather forward an internet gag such as a video or a rambling joke email than tell a joke themselves. Of course, given the joke-telling ability of many people, this might not be a bad thing. Furthermore, it seems like, if anything, this has simply expanded the market for humorous content, rather than shrunk it. Perhaps, instead, we should be more worried about the decreasing ability for people to understand jokes than the desire to tell them.

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