[jeramey]

Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.

That said, Shakespeare's humor, as an example, lands more flat with me. English idioms and grammar have changed quite a bit since the 16th century, and though I can intellectually approach his plays and recognize the humor, I rarely laugh out loud to it because there's additional mental load required just to understand what's been said. I suspect that may be true of "Who's on First" in another couple of hundred years, too. I'll report back in 2224 and let you know!

[caf]

I tend to agree that Who's On First is a exactly the sort comedy that will lose its pithiness in time, moored as it is to the cultural context of baseball and contemporary English wordplay.

[nzgrover]

One of my favourite lines is from Three men in a Boat: "George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physician way of putting things".