Did you hear the one about…

A priest, a rabbi and a lawyer walk into a bar and the bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"

The art of joke telling may be dead. One more victim of the internet. I used to belong to a network of friends who'd call someone at nearly any hour to tell the latest. Now the jokes just show up in my inbox looking something like "FW: fw: FW: Too Funny" and with a bunch of >>>>> in front of each line. Occasionally, it is too funny, sometimes it's not. Often, it's a visual thing, so there is no way to share it, but to forward it onward, some horribly photoshopped image of the president in a compromising position or something.

I thought of this recently when I received one of my all time favorite jokes in my inbox. I'd told it a hundred times, so there was no point in hitting the Forward button with it. Still, I laughed at it once more, and I appreciated the gesture.

But before you go to that New Year's party, scroll through your saved messages, find a joke that suits you and your expected audience and practice telling it a few times while driving alone (it's okay, people will think you're on your cell phone) and enjoy being the life of the party.

Yet it's a good thing that we can use that portion of our brains formerly used for storing jokes to remember all our passwords!