Political satire is making a big comeback, but whatever happened to that fine institution, the Great British Joke? Michael Bywater on the way we're just not telling them any more

Did you hear the one about the suicide bomber? You will, if you go to the Edinburgh Fringe: roughly 1,800 acts, and sometimes it seems as if they are all comedians, all of whom want to talk about terrorism. Carry your own rucksack, then if some dodgy-looking Asian tries to get on you just point at it and say, "It's OK, mate, I've got this one." Hear about the Muslim woman who didn't want to die a virgin? It wasn't the sex, just that she didn't want to get to Paradise and have to shag a suicide bomber.

Boom-boom.

That last one is Shazia Mirza's gag, and she's got everything in it: sex, death, religion and delusional males. But jokes in general are thin on the ground. This year's Fringe may be, as its director Paul Gudgin says, the most political since the 1970s, but on the whole comedy now - in Edinburgh or anywhere else - is not about jokes. You know, jokes. Gags. The one about. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar, and the barman says, "Is this some kind of joke?"

Not any more it isn't. Comedy is thriving as never before, but not jokes. Jokeworld is increasingly deserted, like a faded resort. It was a small place, Jokeworld, thinly populated but heterodox, with far more than its fair share of Jews (including God), Irishmen, Pakistanis, bartenders, judges, performing dogs, viola players, hookers, blondes and doctors. And now its day is done. If comedians, negotiating on our behalf with the slithering, ironical ambiguities of life, are the postmodern priesthood, then the joke itself is the brutal animal sacrifice of an earlier faith. There are squeals in jokes, and blood and sawdust, and people get hurt. The joke is unequivocal. The joke says: "You didn't see that coming; you were wrong; now atone, with laughter." Postmodern comedy says: "You know what I mean? Don't you so agree? Aren't we so in this together?" Jokes, in a society based on the idea of relativism and the elision of differences, are just so 1958.

So we don't tell them any more, and nor do we listen. There is something both quaint and bullying about the gag-man; quaint, because his jokes depend on an outmoded formalism (set-up, exposition, tag line) and on an assumed set of common values; bullying, because he is up there, talking, and we are down here, listening and laughing obediently. The pub joke is the same, but with added warfare. The men (and the joke, the gag, is a predominantly male format) telling jokes in a group aren't competing for laughter but for power.

Now, times have changed, in more ways than we sometimes realise. Sigmund Freud declared that the three main routes into the unconscious mind were dreams, parapraxes (or "slips of the tongue") and jokes, most of which, he believed, were about the revelation of hidden desires. In some cases this may be true ("So anyway, this gorgeous blonde slips into his bed in the middle of the night and says, 'I'll do whatever you want' and the bloke thinks for a bit . . .") although most of the material Freud analyses would, on open-mike night, die like a dog in a hail of bottles and jeers.

Jokes also require a common (white, male, sexually incompetent) world-view that is often as discreditable as our secret desires. It's briefly comforting; we may not know what we are, but we know what we are not: the Jew, the Paki, the homo, the Mick, the wife, the mother-in-law (hairnet, dentures, prolapse). And so - nervously - we laugh; and the laughter at the joke is the release of anxiety.

Contemporary comedy is a different animal. It's not the finger-pointing ner-di-ner of the playground, which thrives on difference, but Sybil Fawlty's endless "Yes, I know . . . ooh, I know . . . yes, I know . . ." to her invisible interlocutor at the other end of the bedroom phone: a statement of sympathy and identification which thrives on similarity. If the mission statement of the joke is "Look at that wanker!" modern comedy's credo is "We're all in the same boat".

There are plenty of theories why this should be, and nobody - not even the wonderfully named International Society for Humour Studies (at parties, what do they tell people they do?) - has nailed it down conclusively. Is it the rise of political correctness, itself only an extreme form of good manners, not wanting to make the other guy feel uncomfortable? Is it a consequence of multiculturalism, of the ethical feminisation of society, of the erosion of the all-male boozing group? Is it that men themselves are slowly learning to talk to each other without having to encode their fears in gags? Is it that the internet now disseminates jokes so fast that the question "Have you heard the one about . . . ?" invariably gets the weary answer "Yes"? Is it that there's nowhere they can be told or heard now, over the compulsory blockage of wall-to-wall sound or past the snick-a-snick of iPod earphones? Is it even that the joke is itself a highly ritualistic trope, as formal as any classical sonata, which our more improvisatory and dialectic culture finds uncongenial?

The answer is probably all of the above, with one other, more subtle factor added. We define ourselves as living in a postmodern age; but postmodernism exists in dialogue with its more powerful precursor, modernity. Modernity, in its turn, insists upon the primacy of the individual, and what could be less individual than the joke: a piece of common property, open to all? So the joke says nothing about the teller; adds nothing to the teller's brand image, except how well he (or, rarely, she) tells it.

And most of us can't tell jokes - but we should, at least briefly, mourn their passing. At its best, a joke can hurl complex information across the gap with extraordinary precision. It can offer a temporary respite from the anxieties of life, a break from its demand that we empathise, understand, be fair and non-judgemental. It can provide a recognition of our own absurdity, or a defusing of our secret fears.

If the joke is dead, at its funeral there should be a eulogy. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Which reminds me of these two old Jewish men, OK, all muffled up, who're sitting on a bench in Central Park, and the morning wears on and they say nothing. And it gets to lunchtime and the office people come out and go back in and the old men still say nothing, and at the end of the afternoon everyone walks through the park, going home, but the old men say nothing, and the sun goes down and in the deepening dusk one old man raises his arms to the heavens and in a voice hoarse and broken with sorrow and regret cries: "Oy vey!" And the other old man looks at him and says: "You're telling me?"

Well, you probably had to have been there.

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