It Seemed Funny at the Time: A large collection of short humor

Please share your own rib-tickling reminiscences in the comments. From the very beginning, when you step out of a person-shaped suitcase into its cartoon cyberpunk world, the gags are fast, furious and sophisticated. Much of the comedy comes from the way the script and mechanics work together with a delightful sense of wordplay, so that the ghost town is actually made out of ghosts and the needles you pick locks with are all hidden in haystacks. A lot of the laughs come from setting traps for your opponent and then accidentally tripping them yourself, prompting a range of lovely Loony Tunes-style death animations.

It also starts with the best two inventory items in history: You do this by rolling objects into giant balls to make new stars. We can just leave it there really. The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos Greek for The Laughter-Lover , a collection of jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD.

During the 15th century , [8] the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini , first published in The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century.

It Seemed Funny at the Time

Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare , the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe. The practice of printers to use jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier.

With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as " With many other descriptions of wit and humour.

There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes".

Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an unrelated joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons. Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; [12] [13] it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke.

In a study of conversation analysis , the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling a single joke. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? Framing is done with a frequently formulaic expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes". Within its performance frame, joke-telling is labelled as a culturally marked form of communication.

Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience.

The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same or similar divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline.

The narrative always contains a protagonist who becomes the "butt" or target of the joke. This labelling serves to develop and solidify stereotypes within the culture. It also enables researchers to group and analyse the creation, persistence and interpretation of joke cycles around a certain character.

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Some people are naturally better performers than others, however anyone can tell a joke because the comic trigger is contained in the narrative text and punchline. A joke poorly told is still funny unless the punchline gets mangled. The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary or more obvious interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation.

Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work.

Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Expected response to a joke is laughter.

The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. Or they do "get it" and don't laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory.

A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context. The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary.

In each situation it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting. The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection.

That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gage the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies.

The context of joking in turn leads into a study of joking relationships , a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect.

But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and re-inforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship. The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board ; reactions include a replied email with a: Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part emailed jokes are passed along verbatim.

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The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially. Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet.

Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful". A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour and light bulb jokes , which describe all kinds of operational stupidity.

Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions viola jokes , catastrophes, settings …walks into a bar , absurd characters wind-up dolls , or logical mechanisms which generate the humour knock-knock jokes. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news.

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An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world — to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it.

A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: Beginning in the s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes , began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the s.

As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectibles throughout Europe in the 19th century Brothers Grimm et al. The Aarne—Thompson classification system was first published in by Antti Aarne , and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature.

Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes , listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales — humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index , which separates tales into their individual story elements.

This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs. The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes.

A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, [67] another index for linguistic verbal jokes, [68] and a third one for sexual humour. Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side.

This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices.

The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems:. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry. Everything was going fine until the day my partner and I had to paint the thing. We were in my garage spray painting the tubes and these two guys come marching up to the house across the street and start yelling at the top of their lungs, beating on the door.

Well I called the police, closed the garage and parked myself in front of the dining room window. Long story short the police showed up in full gear broke down the door and brought out the two boys at gunpoint. So when I was like 9 I went to this aquarium thing and it was a pretty amusing trip overall.

The next day at school, the teacher asked us what we had done over the weekend. Now normally I never raise my hand. But I did this time. I fucking did it this time. The worst possible time. So when I was in the eighth grade, science class was the most boring hours of my life. I started panicking because the game noises were excruciatingly loud. I kept playing and got eaten by a ghost almost after I pressed the start button my hands were shaking like crazy ….

My teacher and everyone else started laughing and I got so red afterwards. Now when we stand up for the pledge, he moves all the way to the back of the room away from me…. In fifth grade, my teacher loathed me. So still, to this day, I get my hands confused. The principal and I were quite aquatinted at this point and so I told her why I was sent back to her office again, and she laughed. My principal wrote on the back of my hands, L and R. She did the same to hers. My best friend and I are super weird, and whenever either of us see an attractive person we tend to take a picture of them and send it to each other, because why not?

Anyway, I was on a cruise ship with my grandparents, and I spot this super cute guy a couple years older than me. I make eye contact with thus cute guy, look at my Grandparents who both look extremely disappointed, and a few other people are looking at me. Obviously I left the room immediately. So I have this health teacher who is really insane about exercise. This woman has done ironman triathlons, and talks about going to the YMCA at 5: Basically we have this project to pick a health goal to do for a month.

Things like drinking water or doing squats. For that you need some motivation so we were talking about physical things to reward ourselves with. She decided to tell us about her sporting goods fetish, where she goes into a store and buys a bunch of gear like they were books. Looking back that was my first existential crisis. Now, in 6th grade I had one really close friend who I never actually got into a fight with. I was really good at holding grudges because I was not a forgiving child, so for three weeks I completely ignored my best friend in anger to the point where she started crying in front of the teacher and he asked what was going on.

Sniffing candles with my best friend: So my best friend and I were in a super market and there were a lot of new candles. Whatever I guess we sniffed to much candles because we started laughing very hard and I lay on the floor and my best friend fell into to pasta shelf which made us laugh even more and louder and people were already staring at us.



After the final bell, my friend and I were walking to our buses after school through a crowded hallway. We were talking about childhood and reminiscing about old memories, and we somehow started talking about which people became hot since middle school. And OF COURSE he heard her, but it was so awkward so he just walked past us looking down at his phone and my friend fell on the ground from embarrassment.

I took Chinese at school as a freshman. Our teacher wanted us to watch a Chinese movie in that free time, and I just so happened to watch one recently on YouTube. I offered to find it, and my teacher let me use her computer, that was connected to a Promethean board so that the whole class could see what I was doing on the screen.

Reward Yourself

When I opened my history I was mortified since stupid me had forgotten that being the awkward virgin that I was at the time I had searched up tutorials on kissing and making out that previous night. The whole class was hysterically laughing, my teacher was extremely confused, and I almost cried as I scrolled past all the kissing tutorials and finally found the movie. A couple years ago my friends and I were going to see a movie in the theatre at the mall. Instead of paying the ridiculous movie theatre prices for pop and candy, we decided to go to target to buy some stuff.

My friend told me she had seen a bottle with my name on it inside this bin of Coke. The pop was at least five or six feet in diameter. I watched as people passed the mess and made looks of disgust. Imagine if I had opened it inside of the theatre…. Once upon a time I had a friend that was going to a Panic! At The Disco concert and she promised me she would face time me so that I could watch with her.

So she messaged me at like the middle of the night telling me to answer her FaceTime call but I was at my neighbors house which also happened to be my cousins house so I started running out the door and my sister followed me behind and was chasing after me. I waited for almost two hours, refusing to take a shower even though the mud was starting to dry up. This was two years ago and to this day every time my sister sees the pothole she starts dying from laughter.

When I was younger, around 3 or 4 years old, I had a phase of flushing things down the toilet. I opened the cap, let it go into the toilet, and flushed. One time in fifth grade, I was walking back to class from the bathroom. Before I continue, I should specify two things. Now for whatever reason, I was swinging my arms around in a wild half-windmill motion. So there I was, swinging my arms dramatically, then just when I got to the corner….

I had accidentally slapped someone in the face. It took me a second to realize who it was: I was mortified, but he just started laughing. I have decided to remain anonymous to protect my identity from the foolishness. I removed the various packets from the bowl, added the flavor and vegetables, then put the bowl in the microwave. After about a minute or two, I realized something was wrong. A terrible burning smell had filled my kitchen.

I opened the door to my microwave and…low and behold…I had neglected to add water. There was some smoke coming from the bowl. Not wanting to waste the ramen, I went to the sink and added water, which filled the room in acrid smoke for several seconds. I then returned the bowl to the microwave and cooked it for two more minutes before attempting to eat it. It went okay for a little while, until I discovered a globule of blackened noodles which had turned into some sort of strange crystalline substance yet seen in nature by humankind.

I had a change of heart. When I was in the 6th grade my parents decided I should get my first cell phone because I was going to middle school now and things were different. I took decent care of my phone and never needed a replacement. Well, flash forward to Memorial Day weekend. My family and another family went camping up in Pennsylvania for the weekend. Well, one of the days we were up there my buddy, Oliver, and I decided to take the kayaks out on the lake. Genius me, decided she wanted to listen to the 4 Selena Gomez songs I had on my phone.

I thought it would be a brilliant idea to put my phone in a plastic bag to protect it from the water. When we got back from kayaking I took my phone out only to find the bag was submerged in water. We had no rice or anything to save my phone so we tried laying it out to dry, not even 15 minutes later it starts down pouring destroying my phone even more. When I was around four or five I was with my mom at this store buying some Christmas gifts.

I grabbed two of them and stashed one in each of my pockets. I still remember the rush of energy I got from actually leaving the store undetected. I had the absolute worst social anxiety when I was a kid so I was a absolutely sobbing, telling this poor employee how horrible a person I was.