WSG Newsletter: Humour on the Web

Issue: September 29, 2000

“Borrow money from a pessimist – he won’t expect it back.” Or contemplate this – “A day without sunshine is like, night.” These are words of wisdom from the Net. There are twenty-three more at Aphorisms and Other Assaults.

Some people won’t have time for this -- but the Web is a funny place and this newsletter aims to show where and how.

There are jokes galore, puns, pranks, stand-up comedy routines on audio, Internet radio programs, cartoons, political satire, parody, classical humourists. The main caveat is that tastes in humour differ widely - what amuses one can bore another or, worse, offend.

Jokes and Funny Stories
There is that old saw about two kinds of people: those who have ulcers and those who give them. Email created another two kinds of people: those who hate jokes in their email, and those who send them.

People who send them will love the large and searchable collections of jokes on the Web. These archives are also excellent as a source for a joke or funny story to insert into a speech, a presentation, or the next date.

Rec.Humor.Funny, the Usenet group, has been making people laugh since the beginning of Internet time. The best are collected at the netfunny Web site. There are 2000 in the best-of archive from 1987-mid98 along with the latest of the day. The jokes are labeled to forewarn the unwary as smirk, chuckle, swearing, sexual, heard it. RHF also has links to Best Comedy on the Net.
www.netfunny.com/rhf/

JokesPlus.com is a collection of nearly 900 jokes, well arranged, if rather idiosyncratically, into lists, national pride, work place, stories, other, and the rest.
www.JokesPlus.com

Readers Digest is still hanging in with Humor in Uniform, Campus Life, and Life’s Like That. But when was it like that – in the forties? There is a directory to 4000 jokes by topic, called the Laugh Bank – perfect for speech making.
www.readersdigest.com/
laughline/index.asp

Moreover News, excellent for its aggregation of news stories from over 1500 services, delivers jokes too. Webmasters can put Joke-of-the-Day on their Websites for free. See today’s haul in the sidebar or at w.moreover.com/jokes/ .

Puns
The pun is said to be an acquired taste. Oscar Levant, an amusing pianist of some note in the 1940s, said “a pun is the lowest form of humor – when you don’t think of it first”.

At Pun of the Day puns are organized by topic. Under food - “Is coffee your daily grind?” and there is the story about “A restaurant that decided to serve submarine sandwiches, but later went under”. Pun of the Day has more than the daily groan – there are capsule bios of famous funny people and a good set of laugh links. www.punoftheday.com

Search Engines and Subject Directories
MetaEureka will search across three databases (Humor Database, Jokes 2000, and Jokes 2U) to find the right jokes – look for librarians and find “they never die, they just check out”; or lawyers never die – they lose their appeal, or their briefs.
www.metaeureka.com

The large directories are bursting with categories for humor and comedy. Open Directory (www.dmoz.org) has 153 categories with the word humor. Some of these are funnier than the jokes -- Recreation-Pet-Rabbits-Humor? Yahoo has 121 categories. Job Humor has so many sites that Yahoo created sub-categories for bosses, customer service, food service, law enforcement, pizza delivery, librarians, and tech support. What no lawyers? And what could possibly be funny about pizza delivery?

If you really do want a joke a day in your email, Open Directory has 104 mailing lists under Recreation – Humor – Mailing Lists.

Lastly there are no fewer than 12 guides at About.com to tickle funny bones. The Comedy Channel has regular Humor and UK Humour, Mark Twain all by himself, and places for fans of the Simpsons and South Park, there’s Christian Humor and Political Humor and Sick Twisted Jokes. No one should go without a laugh.

Cartoons
For many the morning smile is a cartoon. The great strips are on the Web. The major cartoon distribution syndicates have Web sites:

• Creators Syndicate (www.creators.com), home to favourites such as Wizard of Id and Andy Capp;

• United Media (www.comiczone.com), surfing destination of the business set to pick up tips from Dilbert and co-workers;

• Universal Press Syndicate (www.uexpress.com), source of lessons about relationships from Cathy and politics from Doonesbury;

• and King Features (www.kingfeatures.com), featuring comic classics. (Can Rex Morgan and Mary Worth still be alive?)

Syndicate sites make it easy to find the strip but are sparing with archives. There may be a week or two for viewing, and sometimes links to newspapers for the current issue. CToons is a better site for archives, with up to 4 months for some of the toons in its collection of 50. Cartoon addicts can create a MyToon page.
www.CToons.com

The classiest is the New Yorker’s Cartoon Bank with more than 20,000 cartoons – many of them published in the New Yorker - categorized by artist, date, topic. These cartoons can be licensed for use or purchased as prints. Searching and viewing is free and so is sending ecards. Don’t miss the Cartoon Channel displaying a new cartoon every minute.
www.cartoonbank.com

Satire - Often Political
There is much to entertain the news reader with an extra half-hour. Salon publishes original articles on politics and cultures every day. While many of the writers are infected with some satire, Jake Tapper, Washington correspondent for Salon, writes some biting pieces about US politics. More satire and wit in cartoons and text can be found under Comics.

The funniest news source is The Onion. Reporting on the Summer Olympics in September, The Onion headlined IOC: Many viewers may be using Olympics-enhancing drugs. One of the cleverest stories was early in the Bosnian conflict when The Onion had Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia: Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to be First Recipients.

Frank Magazine is Canada’s closest equivalent. Frank Online has portions of the print magazine with some scandalous reporting from the nation’s capital. (www.frankmag.net)

Audio / Video
Comedy comes in multimedia form as well. Users of RealPlayer can tune in daily to Comedy Central for parodies of the news with Jon Stewart, the foul-mouthed antics of South Park and snippet take-offs on games shows and soaps. (See Real Guide Channels)

Robin Williams is selling his manic comedy in half-hour shows through Audible.com. wo episodes are free, and others cost $2 to $3 (US). If Williams isn’t a fave, there is also Dave Barry. Audible.com is an online store for digital readings of books, newspapers, magazines, and speeches. Users can listen on their PC or save to a portable player.

Comedy World is a media company that produces original comic content. Some programming can be heard – and viewed – at the Web site. The Canadian troupe, Kids in the Hall, and the cheeky Sandra Bernhard are on the roster of comedians. Comedy World does warn that it is intended for adult audiences.

E-Text
But if your preference is for a good short story by a favourite humourist, Searchebooks.com might find it for you. It has indexed the content of “thousands” of online books – most from the Gutenberg collection. There are two URLs –one to the provider and the other to the online text of the book. Search for author or title. Lots of Mark Twain, some P.G. Wodehouse, no Stephen Leacock.

Conclusion
There are so many very funny sites that have had to go unmentioned. Use the directories listed in TIG Research to find more, share sites with friends, and find a moment in the day for a chuckle.

What do you think?

What makes you laugh on the Web? Where do you go for a break?

Post your questions and comments to the conference on Browsers on the TIG WebBoard http://fis2.fis.utoronto.ca:8080/~tig.

Newsletter by Gwen Harris.Gwen wishes she had more time for humour on the Web.

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