HUMOUR FROM MY INBOX ------ ---- -- ----- WARNING: Some of this Material is Adult Humour To View Items Ranked By Popularity, Click: Here To Go To The Apache Server Listing, Click: Here If you go to the Apache Server Listing (below) you can alter the sort order by clicking on the heading above each column. On the other hand, if you click the Item Rankings you will see a list, with long descriptions, ordered by number of hits (since 01-Jun-2002). This is a small collection of jokes mostly taken from my e-mail over the past few years. It is only a fraction of the total humorous e-mails that I have received. My approach to e-mail has been similar to my approach to the internal office mail that it replaced. The old paper memos and letters used to sit on my desk in piles that grew steadily. When these mounds grew too large -- I turfed the whole lot out, or stuffed it into a little corner. This approach, when applied to electronic mail, has resulted in a lot of the items being either discarded or hidden away in some giant file that I can't be bothered sifting though just to get the jokes out of it. However, sometimes I regret having discarded or lost some of that material. Others turn up in forgotten corners of old computers. For example the computer nerd humour in KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), which outlines the various ways that one might shoot oneself in the foot with various computer languages. This was rediscovered on an old DOS PC recently. It was actually a re-write of gag from the eighties, but had been upgraded with some early nineties additions. I need not have worried about losing it however. There are many examples of this old gag on the web with some very modern addenda. I will upgrade this gag with the recent additions. Of course it has only become feasible to keep all my e-mail in the last few years. Until recently, the high cost of storage media, incompatible file formats and the sheer volume of data has made it difficult to archive e-mail. Although the problems of incompatible file formats and high volume remain, the cost of storage has fallen so dramatically that it is now possible to store the data cheaply. Most of the pre-2000 e-mail from my inbox has been shredded into electrons. Having said that, I must admit that I haven't received many humorous e-mails since late 2001. The reasons could be: * There is less humour around these days. * I get less e-mail. * People don't send me jokes, because they think when someone gets to my age they lose their sense of humour. * All of the above. Humour has always been problematic for bureaucracies. A good example of this is the so-called "Ethnic" jokes. There is an International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. As far as I know Australia is a signatory to this convention. At present however, the law seems to have been implemented at the state level. There was some talk about the fact that "Ethnic" jokes might be classified as "Racial Vilification". Fortunately Australian comedians do not seem to have been intimidated by this mindless bullshit. It is very easy to tell whether something is Racial Vilification or Hatred. If it's funny then it is not Racial Hatred. If it's Racial Hatred it's not funny. And how do you tell if it's funny? Well, did you laugh? If more than fifty per cent of the audience laughed, I think we can safely assume that it was funny. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), this test has to be democratic. That is, it must be based on majority opinion. It's not good enough if The Dallas Chapter of the National Socialist White People's Party think it's a real hoot and 5 billion other folk fail to see the humour. Such an imprecise definition of humour is bound to bother bureaucrats. Comedians, on the other hand, have an instinctive understanding of the definition, because they constantly tread the thin dividing line between humour and bad taste. That's what makes them funny. And that's why they get paid to do it. If there is a humorous side to this it is the fact that for a brief time the possibility of legislating about what we could laugh at was actually considered. Which is a bit of a joke! It seems that geo-political systems go through phases where the acceptability of humour varies considerably. Throughout history various zealots have arisen with humourless dispositions ranging from rather dour to frighteningly psychopathic. In the 16th century, hot-eyed iconoclastic Protestants and the cold-eyed sadistic Inquisitors who opposed them, showed little if any inclination towards humour. In the 17th Century, the famous Puritan fanatics of New England were seriously unfunny. In the 18th century, revolutionary fanatics in France unleashed "The Terror" on their fellow citizens quite mirthlessly. The 19th Century saw the rise of modern military technology that was capable of inflicting large scale destruction and death from a considerable distance, and was deployed effectively against less developed societies. And if you think that gloomy bunch of dipsticks were bad, have a gander at the 20th century, which unfortunately boasts more cheerless fanatics than the rest of them combined. Take your pick from grim communists, whose struggle necessitated the "temporary" imposition of dictatorship, or the saturnine fascists who opposed them. There is a bevy of groups who are just as dismal if less dangerous, all of them inspired with commitment to "the cause", which is, needless to say, very serious, demanding a sombre prosecution of their duties, and leaves little time for frivolous matters that are amusing. The Taliban, whose recent departure from the world political stage, will be widely unlamented, actually made it illegal to laugh. Yes it would be funny if it wasn't true. But it really was a crime to sing, dance, smile, laugh, play a musical instrument or otherwise show any signs of merriment or levity under the heavy yoke of that wretched regime. The one thing this miserable collection of drongos and dickheads had in common is that they all needed to lighten up a little and maybe have a good laugh. And even if they were unwilling to try enjoying life, at least let others do so, rather than devote themselves tirelessly to the task of murdering anyone who disagreed with them. Of course, the difficulty with humour is that it is not universal. A joke which seems quite hilarious to one person may be extremely offensive to another. A recent video showed Osama bin Ladin having a jolly good chuckle about the fact that some of the fanatical f***wits who participated in the attack against New York on 11 September didn't realise that it was a suicide mission until they actually got on the flight. That was just soooo amusing Osama, are you still laughing? Over-zealous devotion to a cause often leads to a humourless disposition. A recent example of this was the modern feminist movement. This movement actually started in the USA in the sixties, even though they claimed to have a tradition stretching back over centuries and encompassing the entire human species. Many of the political groupings that arose then were mostly a reaction to the fifties, the golden decade of US post-war abundance and conformity that preceded them. These groups were often idealistic and earnest to the point of tedium. In the late sixties or the early seventies some American academics and writers came up with with a humorous list of guidelines that were "politically correct". It was a number of ludicrous recommendations of the way that language would need to be reformed in order to conform with the neo-Calvinist ideals of the serious young persons of the era. The important thing to realise about this list is that it was a JOKE! It was a tongue in cheek, though rather lame attempt at humour. In a sense it was an early example of nerd humour. Over the ensuing decades, I watched with amusement, turning to fascination, and finally to horror as the media and then our political establishment began to apply these recommendations as if they were serious! Around about this time the "Bee Gees" brought out a song called "The Joke", which included the lyrics: "I started a Joke!" Which is almost a non sequitor but I thought I would mention it. I wish I could remember who those academics/writers were. Because they are not just a figment of my imagination. I distinctly recall reading an article in "Time Magazine" about those jokers. Of course we have to be suspicious of any distinct memories about the sixties. As in the old one-liner: "If you remember the sixties, you weren't really there." This bothers me so much, I even searched the web to try and discover who they may have been. As is so often the case when using web searches, I found nothing ... except more jokes! Most of which I'd already seen. So if anyone, reading this, knows who they were, can you please tell me? My e-mail address is at the bottom. Political correctness really started to gather momentum in the eighties. Newspapers would carry statements like: "Ms. Anne Smith, a female silly party spokesperson said "That the chairperson was blah blah blah ..."" Actresses would pointedly refer to themselves as actORs, which destroyed the old conjunctive about what "The bishop said to the actress", but opened an unthinkable array of possibilities about what the bishop might have said to the actOR. The very earnest politically correct brigade became like a new unofficial bureaucracy. They did not even have to exist. Journalists only had to imagine that they were out there somewhere reading every word that they wrote. And the "new-speak" was distinctly bureaucratic. You only have to watch Sir Humphrey, of "Yes, Minister" fame, to realise that the primary aim of bureaucrats is to use more words with more syllables to convey less meaning. And occasionally I met real live proponents of political correctness. When I engaged them in dialogue I would suggest that the expunging of all female nouns and pronouns from the English language was maybe not such a big victory for "feminism". I was often met with glowering hostility. I knew that the politically correctness groundswell had crested when I finally heard someone refer to a manhole as a "person hole". This had been the last item on the joke list from the sixties. There were some good signs that humourless feminists were at last starting lighten up when some feminist jokes appeared. Jokes like: Q: How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? A: Oh about one and half, if you slice them thinly enough. And of course there was the inevitable backlash against political correctness. The Internet has proven remarkably quick at distributing some information and in other areas it has been slow to catch up. When the jokes about sexism and the backlash finally started arriving in my e-mail most of them were at least ten years old. I have put them in the category of "Battle of the sexes". This is a battle that seems to have been going on for a while. We can find evidence in Shakespear and Chaucer. And it is a battle that will probably continue as long as there are men and women on earth. You will probably find fifty per-cent of these jokes quite amusing. Nearly all the feminist and backlash jokes were in circulation before the Internet really got into full swing in the nineties. Up till then the Internet had been the domain of enthusiasists and the humour had been nerdy computer humour. You can see some of this in this list under the heading of "Computer". There still is lots of Computer humour being generated. Most of it, these days, is directed at Microsoft. Which does not bode well for the Redmond Giant. In fact one of these jokes was reported in "The Age" newspaper as fact. This was the Microsoft vs GM gag which at the time was not even news, and certainly not true. Well it may be true, but it is not fact. That is to say, General Motors did not actually publish this. It was joke of course. It was a several months old when it arrived in my inbox in 1998. I did not take a note of the page and date when "The Age" ran the story. It was in the Tuesday Computer section in March 2002. It does serve to illustrate the way that the Internet can generate its own news. The Microsoft vs GM gag is nonetheless a good gag. Although Citizen Gates might possibly say: "We are not amused." The subject of computers has of course been covered in great detail on the web. If you are an experienced programmer or a hacker (I use the term in the original and correct sense) you will have no doubt seen the emacs_humour text which used to be part of the emacs tarball (and may still be). It is included in this collection. I found it very amusing, especially the contribution about "the mighty ed". If you are not a Unix programmer, you will probably just shake your head sadly, that anyone could find such inane techno-babble entertaining. The Internet has been a great source of hoaxes, especially computer related. These usually take the form of chain mail, and are easy to recognise and often amusing. With one exception, I have not included any of these here. They can cause mischief and can mislead some people, especially those who are unwary and not well informed about computer technology. However there is one exceptional hoax which deserves a mention. This was an email which arrived in my inbox in July 2001. Some well intentioned person sent it to me as a "virus warning". Take some time to read the message in aol.exe.hoax.txt, if you haven't already seen it. Now, would you be fooled by this warning? If you would, then I must say you have done well to stay with me this far. It is probably the longest your attention span has ever stayed on a single topic in your entire life. But take it easy, ok? You don't want to over-tax yourself. And I'd hate to be held responsible for over-heating your brain. For the rest of you, I hope you will forgive my rather snobbish attitude to comprehension. It's just that when I went to school, it was compulsory to pass English. And it is fair to say that anyone who would have been fooled by the AOL hoax would not have passed English, and as a consequence, would not have achieved a school Leaving Certificate. Nevertheless many people in the USA were fooled by this hoax, which is a sad comment on that country's education system. Although, I shouldn't get too smug. Recent trends in our own political system suggest that Australia's education system may be on a similar downward spiral. Sex of course is perennial. Why do so many of these jokes seem similar to those we used to tell at school. Maybe there is no such thing as a new joke. Jokes are often interchangeable. For instance, many of the "Irish" jokes told in the British Isles surface in Australia as "Kiwi" jokes and not unsurprisingly they are recycled in the "Land of the Long White Cloud" as "Aussie" jokes. If anyone has a good joke. Please send it to me at my e-mail address, below. Gerry Patterson April 2002 E-mail: Webmaster Go To: Top Of This Page Go To: PGTS Home Page Go To: PGTS Journal