molly.com
Saturday 17 May 2008
Musing About Online Laughter
Amusing, isn’t it, to think about what makes us laugh? Humor (Humour?) relies on so many facets of human emotion and experience. It gets even more complicated when multiple languages and cultural references are involved, as so often occurs in online discourse.
I’ve been dissecting puns and humor (humour?) in my latest posts and Tweets. I can see why some of them would make absolutely no sense to someone who didn’t have the linguistic and cultural references of which I’m aware. Yet, others will, and do. And of course, I amuse myself a lot, even if others find me overwhelming, brutish, unladylike or god-forbid, boringl
Let’s dissect some of your puns and humor (humour?) Please share a quote from something you yourself wrote or said via online means that you find funny. All languages welcome.
Let’s have some fun!
Filed under: humor, society, creativity, community, Twitter
Posted by: Molly | 3:12 pm |
May 17th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Me being a web worker, one of my favorite occasional email signatures:
“But what I really want to do is redirect.”
Oh, and:
“My chiropractor cracks me up.”
May 17th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Ritual
Emotional soup tastes good with
Stake but holding the heart
Still takes
Practice.
May 17th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
@Elkit: Being a Web worker myself (at least in the sense that I think I am one), I don’t get the redirection quote. Maybe I’m not a Web worker after all? (Translation: Can you explain it, please?
May 17th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
I draw much of my humor straight from pop culture. One time I was arguing on a forum and I told this one guy that a JavaScript-based menu will block a search engine spider from crawling all the pages of a Web site faster than a bouncer at a private night club will reject someone trying to get in the door whose name is not on the guest list.
Another one involved the TV show “Married, With Children” - I literally used the episodes where the Bundy family travelled to England as the backdrop for a rather twisted definition of white hat and black hat SEO. I don’t think anybody got the joke…
May 17th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I drew this today because of a comment a friend made about how her dad doesn’t answer her questions anymore.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Oh, good. I hoped you would find it funny. Thanks for your note!
May 18th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
one of my favorite sayings is “love is for losers.” I find that wicked funny because I am a loser. It’s a really long story. But I’m always falling in and out of love.
Oh and the chyropractor joke is really funny.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:59 am
That’s not what in mind I had.
Thought long and hard before I said it because I didn’t want people to realise I was drunk.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Over AIM:
me: you know you’re completely insane?
my father: you know it’s your fault?
I love my family.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:29 am
@Ping: I liked that comic a lot! xkcd is one of my favorite reads, so it fit right into my tastes. Well done!
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
@Voyagerfan5761: it’s a play on “What I Really Want To Do Is Direct” (a book about several film school graduates starting out in the film business).
Having learned that it’s good practice to redirect rather than just abandon an old URL, it’s one of my favorite puns.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:35 am
@Elkit: Ah, now it makes sense. That’s a good one!
Thanks!
June 16th, 2008 at 10:00 am
“You can tell me what you would like me to do, or what you would like accomplished… Not both.”
My forum signature is: “I’m out of time, patience, and my mind… But I have plenty of excuses.”
My most recent favorite was a failed attempt at humor when I asked, “Why would I want to achieve excellence and get more work heaped on me, when I can be mediocre and still get a cost-of-living increase?”
June 20th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
thank you