The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors, LANs 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 laughter, laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with ...

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 Word of mouth, or ''viva voce'', is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one pe ...

printed media Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

, 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 Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that ...

technologies, jokers took advantage of the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

,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 Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

Usenet 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 ...

newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct ...

s (e.g., rec.humor and alt.humor),

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 The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. 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 Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging ...

undergo evolution and mutations. Internet speeds up and globalizes these processes. A FAQ of rec.humor 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 Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...

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 Black comedy, also known as dark comedy, morbid humor, or gallows humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discus ...

, such as

dead baby jokes Dead baby jokes are a joke cycle reflecting dark comedy. The joke is presented in riddle form, beginning with a what question and concluded with a grotesque punch line answer. History According to the folklorist scholar Alan Dundes, the dead ba ...

, 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 YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

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 Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which private individuals (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the product ...

, 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 block A signature block (often abbreviated as signature, sig block, sig file, .sig, dot sig, siggy, or just sig) is a personalized block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an email message, Usenet article, or forum post. Email and Usenet ...

s 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 Caret is the name used familiarly for the character , provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofreade ...

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 A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) ...

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 ...

demotivator A motivational poster, or inspirational poster, is a type of poster commonly designed for use in schools and offices. Intent The intent of motivational posters is to make people achieve more, or to think differently about the things that they ma ...

s, and funny animations.

References

External links

*{{Commonscatinline, Internet humor

Impact on humor

New types of humor

See also

References

External links