The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors,

LAN Lan or LAN may also refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in sp ...

s and WANs, were used merely as another media to disseminate

joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, ...

s and other kinds of

humor Humour (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humorism, humoral medicine of the ancient Gre ...

, in addition to the traditional ones (" word of mouth", printed media, sound recording, radio, film, and TV).Limor Shifman
"Humor in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Continuity and Change in Internet-Based Comic Texts"
''International Journal of Communication'', vol. 1, 2007, ''Quote'': " A content analysis of 400 humorous texts from eight salient humorous websites shows that the Internet functions both as a ‘carrier’ of old humor types such as jokes and cartoons and as a ‘generator’ of new humor types." In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET,Eric S. Raymond, ''The Art of UNIX Programming''
p. 44
''Quote'': "Software, ideas, slang, and a good deal of humor flowed over the experimental ARPANET links. Something like a shared culture began to form" e-mail, Usenet newsgroups (e.g.,

rec.humor Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

and

alt.humor The ''alt.*'' hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "''alt.''", organized hierarchically. The ''alt.*'' hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, al ...

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

s, etc, and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication. A popular form of internet humour is found in the form of '

internet meme An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

s'.

Impact on humor

Internet made an impact on humor in several important ways. Similarly to other technical innovations (from printing to TV), Internet significantly increased the speed and the extent of the propagation of humor over the world.Giselinde Kuipers, "Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke", , 2015
pp.41, 42
/ref> The joke is a commonly transmitted type of

. It is well-known that orally-transmitted jokes and other kind of folklore undergo evolution and mutations. Internet speeds up and globalizes these processes. A FAQ of

gave the following tongue-in-cheek description how jokes propagated in the era of newsgroups:

#Somebody makes up the joke. #The joke spreads to about 50 people. #Somebody posts it to rec.humor. #Ten thousand people read the joke on rec.humor. #Eight hundred of these people repeat the joke to somebody. #Twenty of _those_ people are clueless enough to repost the joke to rec.humor, apparently lacking either the reading skills to have seen it the first time, the basic pattern-recognition capability to identify it in its last ten repetitions, or the short-term memory to realize that it's the same joke again. #Loop back to step 4, about ten times. #Repeat from step 3 about every two months.

On the opposite side, unlike previous technical means, internet as a whole eliminates censorship and

self-censorship Self-censorship is the act of censoring or classifying one's own discourse. This is done out of fear of, or deference to, the sensibilities or preferences (actual or perceived) of others and without overt pressure from any specific party or insti ...

of humor. For example, before the Internet, black comedy, such as dead baby jokes, was almost exclusively spread orally. Internet blurred the lines between written and spoken in terms of language use and the directness of speech, between what is permitted in private and in public. Also, YouTube blurred the distinction between a spoken and recorded joke, in that the narrator is actually present. Limor and Lemish observe that internet humor is a part of the participatory culture, where the "consumers" of jokes may reciprocate by generating and transmitting humor, i.e., act as "producers" and "distributors".

New types of humor

New possibilities provided by electronic means of communication gave rise to new types of humor. An early example of these is humorous

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...

. While the precursor of the ASCII art, the "typewrite art", has been known since 19th century, it was available to few. Whereas ASCII art, including silly one, has become ubiquitous in sig blocks in discussion boards and e-mails. One may find quite a few silly examples in the ''

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...

'', which also mentions subgenres of ASCII art humor: puns on the letter/character names (e.g., if read "B" as "

bee Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyly, monophyletic lineage within the ...

" and the caret character (^) as "

carrot The carrot ('' Daucus carota'' subsp. ''sativus'') is a root vegetable, typically orange in color, though purple, black, red, white, and yellow cultivars exist, all of which are domesticated forms of the wild carrot, ''Daucus carota'', nat ...

", the one may create an ASCII art rebus for a "bee in a carrot patch") and pictures of "silly cows" .

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...

, ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'', , 1996
pp. 48, 49
/ref> The ability to easily manipulate with images and videos combined with ease of the dissemination of them via the Internet introduced new forms of graphical humor, such as

lolcat A lolcat (pronounced ), or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak. Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laugh out ...

s, demotivators, and funny animations.

References

External links

*{{Commonscatinline, Internet humor

Impact on humor

New types of humor

See also

References

External links