As soon as I found out Shaq had announced his retirement from the NBA, I immediately tweeted, "Shaq just announced his retirement. Hope that means he'll have time to take his martial arts movies more seriously."


Sure, I was tempted to go with a Kazaam reference, but I decided to stick with the lesser known, Shaq Fu (which I later remembered was actually a video game, and not a movie).


Still, I was pretty pleased with myself, and after a few minutes, decided to jump on Twitter to see how my message had been received.


Nothing. A little surprised, I typed "Shaq" into a Twitter search to see if perhaps the news of his retirement hadn't spread quite yet. And what did I see? Hundreds and hundreds of tweets with my identical joke.

1) Does my generation (raised on Seinfeld and Simpsons) all have the EXACT same humor?
2) Does this teach us how incredibly formulaic and unoriginal most humor is?