As usual, I was trying to be clever.

And, as usual, I wasn't succeeding.

A few days ago, I sagely told my 22-year-old daughter and her 16-year-old brother that gasoline was better many years ago than it is today.

"Why's that, Daddy?" asked the daughter.

"Because," I said, struggling to hide a smirk, "there's no fuel like an old fuel."

I was expecting, if not guffaws, then at least groans at my puny play-on-words.

What I got was nothing.

Blank stares.

I mean, nothing.

"Get it?" I said. "No fuel like an old fuel — no fool like an old fool?"

The boy said: "I don't get it, Pop."

The girl looked at me sadly, undoubtedly wondering when exactly her father had lost his edge.

"Wait a minute," I said incredulously. "You mean to tell me neither of you has ever heard the saying, 'there's no fool like an old fool'"?

They shook their heads.

"Sorry, Pop," said the boy.

I wandered off, realizing that at age 54 I had just proved the adage. There is indeed no fool like an old fool.

Only an old fool would expect young people to be aware of a saying that was probably ancient when I was in diapers. However, just to be sure, I asked a couple of 20-somethings around the office if they had ever heard of "no fool like an old fool."

Again, nothing.

I have decided to start pricing shawls and rocking chairs and prefacing everything I say with: "Back in my day ... "

It's not so much that I begrudge the inevitable giving way of my generation to the next, it's that most of the things I thought were important about the generation before mine are fading away.

I'm pretty sure that's what's bothering me.

"Every writer is a writer of the generation before," opined author Wilfrid Sheed.

Wilfrid had that right.

A whole generation is growing up without knowing who Johnny Carson is ... or Walter Cronkite ... or Doris Day.

I don't expect young folks to know who Al Jolson was, but how long will it be until they won't remember Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jr.?

A year or two before he died in 1998, Sinatra was asked what he thought of the music being produced in the 1990s.

"It's crap," he said eloquently.

As far as I'm concerned, he was absolutely right. But I also recognize that thinking the Top 40 music of the day is crap indicates that you're not only over the hill, you probably can't even see the hill from where you've traveled.

I reveled in the music of the '60s, but even then I realized that for all their talent, the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan couldn't compare with Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

I'll be the first to admit that I haven't given today's music a fair shot, but nothing today seems remotely as good — or as important — as what used to come out of Tin Pan Alley.

"Predominant opinions," said Benjamin Disraeli, "are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing."

Also sadly vanishing into time are the laughs generated by an incredible generation of comics I saw growing up.

Try sometime to explain to a young adult how funny it was when Jack Benny crossed his arms and just looked into the camera.

Lots of luck.

Or how hysterical W.C. Fields was in the Klondike when he kept saying, "And it's not a fit night out for man nor beast" — just before getting a face full of snow.

Any parents, of course, who have not educated their children with Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?" and "Slowly ... I Turned" routines should have the children taken away from them.

Benny, Fields, Abbott and Costello, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Ernie Kovacs, Burns and Allen, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Myron Cohen, Bob Hope, Alan King and even Henny ("Take my wife, please!") Youngman are all gone.

Except for a rare film clip or TV rerun, they are lost to the rising generation.

It's a pity, of course, but only an old fool would think there is anything truly permanent in this world.

And yet, when I did a Google search of the phrase, "there's no fool like an old fool," it revealed 782,000 matches.

Perhaps there are more of us old fools kicking around than I thought. If that's the case, I wonder if any of them would like to know why gasoline was better many years ago than it is today ...

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.