A young person today has a nanosecond attention span, so whatever you do in a humor has to be short. Younger people do not wait for anything that takes time to develop. We're going totally to one-liners. Telling a joke is risk taking. Younger people are more insecure and not willing to put themselves on the line, so a quick one-liner is much safer.

Warren St. John, The New York Times (May 28, 2005) "Wit's end: The death of the joke - Old-style wisecracks are passe in an age of decreasing attention spans, political correctness and the Internet", The Orlando Sentinel, p. E1.