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:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 15:12 | Comments (71)

Comments (71)

  1. 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.”

  2. Ritual

    Emotional soup tastes good with
    Stake but holding the heart
    Still takes
    Practice.

  3. @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? 😉

  4. 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…

  5. I drew this today because of a comment a friend made about how her dad doesn’t answer her questions anymore. 🙂

  6. Oh, good. I hoped you would find it funny. Thanks for your note!

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. Over AIM:

    me: you know you’re completely insane?
    my father: you know it’s your fault?

    I love my family.

  10. @Ping: I liked that comic a lot! xkcd is one of my favorite reads, so it fit right into my tastes. Well done!

  11. @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.

  12. @Elkit: Ah, now it makes sense. That’s a good one! 🙂 Thanks!

  13. “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?”

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  15. thanks friend. Great job.

  16. 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?”

  17. Thought long and hard before I said it because I didn’t want people to realise I was drunk.

  18. I said it because I didn’t want people to realise I was drunk.

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