The Rice University Neologisms Database

Funny. Jokes has changed semantically from the plural form of joke, ‘funny things’ to simply the adjective ‘funny’ by zero-derivation. Jokes is a British slang term attributed to the subculture of townies, who are related to chavs (see chav). These groups create such a rich lexicon that their daily speech is indecipherable to other English speakers (see Bare). Like some words from Chav or Townie English, jokes has now spread beyond social boundaries and is used by many young people who are not associated with these groups. In a case of specialization, some use it to indicate only sarcastic humor.