Historians of comedy, please take note. Hoxsie has found an important moment in the evolution of The Joke. The Altamont (N.Y.) Enterprise of July 21, 1888, featured on its front page what is clearly an early evolutionary form of one of the most important jokes of the 20th century (and beyond). Like most predecessors, it looks both familiar and yet not quite right. The punchline has almost reached its final form, though the pronoun and verb will eventually be cast off, brevity being the soul of wit, and the preposition will shift, as prepositions are wont to do. The set-up, however, is clearly from the Pre-Humorous Period. The “rooster” of this set-up will be replaced by the less specific “chicken,” always presumed to be a hen and much more likely to be found by the side of … well, not by a fence. The fence proved to be an insufficient separation to provide much humor, and flight too easy a way to get from the set-up to the punchline. The tense will shift to the past, where all 1-2, Q&A jokes reside. But somewhere, somewhen, an oldster has to have told a youngster, “You know, in my day, that joke was about a rooster flying over the fence.” And he liked it better that way.