Fun / Humor

Jokes


In this era of high stress, high blood pressure and job-induced neurosis, the old adage of laughter being the best medicine has never been truer. Thankfully, the Internet is one gigantic joke book that encompasses every subject in which you could possibly be interested. Every light bulb joke, every blond joke, and stories skewering every politician that ever ran can be found on the World-Wide Web. You can even peruse a sizeable collection of economist jokes. After visiting some of the sites mentioned here, you'll realize that no subject is too taboo or too esoteric to avoid being made fun of.

The Best

If there's a joke, humorous quote, or top ten list, you can almost be guaranteed to find it in The Oracle Service Humor Archive. This huge site contains everything from the script for Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail to A Politically Correct Dictionary, which it deems "some of the most humor-advantaged, creativity-enhanced, politically correct terms." According to that list, a person who pumps gas is called a petroleum transfer technician. You'll see an organized archive of classic jokes and humor including the fake press release announcing Microsoft's purchase of the Vatican. All jokes are listed with headlines and brief descriptions, including those labeled "offensive." Newer material is well-organized, but not quite as well-organized as the classic material. The interactive humor section lets you write a punch line to a joke chosen by the site's moderator, and you'll even see a comics section for those who prefer graphics with their humor. If you manage to exhaust this site's plethora of humor, you can register to be informed of an update to your favorite section (such as political jokes). This will undoubtedly be a site you'll keep bookmarked.

The Wrecked Humor Collection looks sparse at first glance, but if you dig a little, you can find a lot of very original, funny stuff arranged so you can quickly find jokes that interest you. This site probably has one of the most comprehensive collections of canonical jokes lists anywhere. These collections include parodies of the Barney song and Borg jokes. And if you don't see what you're looking for, a healthy set of links here may help you find it. A very esoteric smattering of top 10 lists live here, like the Top Ten Signs You Bought A Bad Computer ("The only chip inside it is a Dorito,") as well as lists that exceed the usual limit of ten items. But be warned: You'll spend a long time waiting to jump from one section to the other at 14.4. If you watch Letterman just to hear his top ten list, then this is definitely the site for you.

The Rest

LaughWEB is a well-organized selection. Its most redeeming quality is the Life Archive, a collection of clean jokes for people easily offended by the Internet's usual humor offerings. And for such people, the rest of the jokes here are labeled as to degree of offensiveness. If you want a laugh, but don't want to have to wade through a mountain of profanity or sexual innuendo, this is the place to go.

Nathan Mates' Humor Archives at Caltech holds lots and lots of jokes and humor ranging from the canonical list of nun jokes to more Clinton bad hair jokes than you could shake a hundred dollar bill at. The only problem is that most of the jokes are in Unix Compress format, which is fine if you use Mosaic, which will let you download, decompress, and then view the archived jokes. Otherwise, you have to download and decompress them yourself with a freeware utility called Decompress (which this site will point you to), and then use a text viewer to read them. All of this may be more work than you are willing to go through to find a good joke. But if you have the patience, it's worth the effort.

If your day isn't complete without hearing at least a couple of new jokes, stop into Imagine Publishing's Joke Board before bed. New jokes appear almost every weeknight, and users are strongly encouraged to rate the jokes from 1 to 10. You can search the collection or view it by descending score according to how other surfers voted for it. Almost anyone can submit a joke to be posted, so the quality ranges from pretty funny to pretty stupid. But there are enough keepers to merit visiting the site regularly.

The HumourNet Archives houses a wide variety of humor, from bizarre-but-true news stories to one liners, arranged into small collections (called collages here) every few days and sent out to subscribers on a mailing list, which you can also subscribe to here. You can read all the collages, but they are labeled only by number, so if you're looking for a particular type of joke, you're out of luck. If you don't mind a leisurely perusal, though, you'll surely find some genuinely entertaining anecdotes.

If you need a daily joke and can't take the time to surf your favorite sites, subscribe to the Funny Bone , a periodically distributed free collection, for a supply of jokes that's fresh almost daily. You can point your navigator here and peruse the archives of this year's issues. You'll find a surprising amount of amusing stories, but humor connoisseurs have probably heard most of these before.

No discussion of Internet humor would be complete without a comprehensive list of Yo Mama jokes ("Yo Mama so stupid, it took her two hours to watch 60 Minutes"). This is the most comprehensive and relatively attractive page for them. Occasionally amusing and definitely offensive to those who hold maternal relationships dear.

The Mother of all Humor Archives , a rather large collection of jokes, one-liners, and amusing anecdotes, is considered by many to be one of the most definitive humor sites on the Web. We aren't among them. Unfortunately, this archive is not organized by any category: You simply scroll through the list of descriptive headlines and pick something that sounds promising.

Adrian's Humor Collection is a decent collection of almost 500 humor pieces collected from various humor newsgroups such as rec.humor.funny. The pieces range from the nerdy (apocryphal C coding) to the sexual. If you're a Trekker, don't miss the 46 Things That Never Happen in Star Trek.

The Matrix's Humor Collection is a nice assortment of humorous stories, including an extensive selection of top ten jokes. You may have seen some of this stuff elsewhere, but there are enough original jokes to justify a visit. Be forewarned: Most of the jokes here are offensive.

If you still can't get enough of those Reader's Digest jokes, you'll want to pay a visit to Max's WWW Humor Archive. Though definitely not the most extensive collection, it holds enough original chuckles to keep you occupied for a while.

The Online Humor Collection is a huge collection of entertaining newsgroup postings (at least in the moderator's opinion), arranged alphabetically by joke subject. It ranges from the moderately annoying to the moderately amusing.

Today's Five Jokes are usually amusing, but they sound like they were grabbed from a late-night talk show host's monologue.

Hivort's Humor Digest is a nice place to visit if you like edited jokes. The site maintainer edits out "all the stupid and tasteless jokes." Very short in comparison to others.

Jokes about economists and economics houses a surprising amount of jokes about the economy and those who think they understand it.

by Shane Mooney

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Copyright (c) 1995 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company is prohibited. Internet Life and the Internet Life logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995