I've always lived in a city. I'm very social, and in a place like New York, even if you're alone on the subway, you never feel lonely.
A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.
We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.