No one’s safe from the laughter

A joke’s a joke, right? Or maybe it depends where the joke appears. Television broadcasts stand-up acts as you might see them in a comedy club, while paradoxically seeming at once more intimate and detached. A joke heard over the radio forces the audience to listen closely, requiring the audiences to mentally imagine the joke or story as it unfolds. Written jokes, whether in Reader’s Digest or Playboy, must not rely on timing, but rather on cleverness or wordplay.

The web offers a unique venue for joke telling. The variety of available formats (Word, image, animation) broadens the possibilities for humor.

Consider video on the web. The clichéd line “A man walks into a bar” has been turned in a short film telling three jokes which visually start out just that way. A Guy Walks into a Bar, available at www.ifilm.com, could only have found distribution on the web.

What if you don’t want to search the web for jokes? Friends send jokes via email to brighten your day. Some people choose carefully what jokes they send to whom; others send them out to everyone on their email address book (or so it seems). We are bombarded with humor whether we like it or not.

While many of these jokes are the same ones you could read anywhere, from puns to ribald humor, others exist in a format unique to the web, and they frequently are political and/or disturbing.

One macabre (and true) example of this dark humor is the Darwin Awards, given to people posthumously after they’ve died in some bizarre and always stupid way. We can learn about unfortunate souls who were neither the fittest nor smartest humanity had to offer.

One 1994 Darwin Award winner: “So things were bound to go wrong when a 19-year-old male, driving the A67 highway near the Dutch town of Blerick, sought to impress his two passengers by putting his car on cruise control at 20 mph, getting out of the car, and running alongside it. He planned to jump back in and drive on, but the moment his feet hit the ground, he fell over and slammed headfirst into the asphalt. He was admitted to the hospital with severe brain damage, and died the next day.”

Disturbing parody also exists. The pictures at www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?s= &threadid=56995&perpage=25&pagenumber=1 are real pictures taken from www.ready.gov, a government site meant to help prepare the public for a terrorist attack. In one image, one man is seen blowing a whistle, while another is yelling. The revised caption is: “If you spot terrorism, blow your anti-terrorism whistle. If you are bald, yell really loud.”

For a drawing of a man pushing a door with his shoulder and a red arrow in between him and the door, the revised caption is: “If you spot a terrorist arrow, pin it against the wall with your shoulder.” The new captions point out the ambiguity of the pictures and perhaps the futility of some of the proposed solutions.

Jokes also function as a way to deal with fear. An example is The Tourist Guy. Obviously photo edited and distributed soon after 9/11, this picture of a tourist standing on an observation deck of the World Trade Center right before the plane collides with the building initially suggests the horror and fear created by the events of the day. Seeing this man on the observation deck (his camera was said to have been found in the wreckage) brings attention to the horror and randomness of the terrorist attack. “He was just a tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time, wasn’t he? It could have been anyone.”

Look up images of The Tourist Guy on Google to see images of this unlucky fellow show up in the unlikely places: with Kennedy at his assassination, with the Brady Bunch, or on Mars.

Other humor takes a political stance. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration received criticism for its handling of the disaster. A photo edited image of President Bush and his father fishing on a flooded street of New Orleans has been circulated widely around the internet, makes a statement clearer than dozens of editorials.

The most interesting examples of humor result from websites utilizing their own technology to create humor and satirical commentary. Consider Google. The search engine offers an option, “I’m Feeling Lucky,” which takes you to one site rather than offering a complete but overwhelming list of sites from which the user can choose.

Typing in “French Military Victories” and choosing “I’m Feeling Lucky” leads to a page citing no documents and inquiring if the user meant “French Military Defeats”. Typing in “failure” and selecting I’m Feeling Lucky took the user to a biography of President George W. Bush (until recently). In the interest of fairness perhaps, one now comes to Michael Moore’s webpage. (Typing in failure President still brings up our current leader.)

So what does all of this say about web humor? The web’s uniqueness allows us to incorporate preexisting text, images, and ultimately, knowledge into our comedy. Facts can be repackaged (the Darwin Awards), reimagined (Photoshop), or reorganized (Google) to fit the needs of the joke. We can incorporate reality in our storytelling, and so parody and satire are likely to make up a bulk of the humor.

The jokes may be offensive to some or many, but this offers another example of the democratization of the web. Anyone can tell any joke and perhaps enlighten us along the way (or just make us giggle).

So, you too can be funny, whether you’re artistic or just good at using Google, or even if you’ve just subscribed to enough email sites. People want to communicate with friends and acquaintances, and how better than with a joke. The internet allows us to copy, alter, and copy again. Like comedians who share, retell and recreate jokes (as in the recent film The Aristrocrats), the internet permits us to all take part.

But what about simple storytelling and one-liners (and don’t worry, you’ll continue to find them filling up your email account)? Funny.com lets you search based on topic, rating, and length – find a joke for any occasion.

Jeremy Sarachan teaches in the Department of Communication/Journalism at St. John Fisher College. He also is the owner of Hammersaw Media, www.hammersaw.com.