Internet Humor

The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another media to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the traditional ones ("word of mouth", printed media, sound recording, radio, film, and TV). In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET,e-mail,Usenet newsgroups (e.g., rec.humor and alt.humor), bulletin board systems,..., and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication.

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. The joke is a commonly transmitted type of internet meme. 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 rec.humor gave the following tongue-in-cheek description how jokes propagated in the era of newsgroups:

On the opposite side, unlike previous technical means, internet as a whole eliminates censorship ans self-censorship of humor. For example, before the Internet extremely sick jokes, such as dead baby jokes, were almost exclusively spread orally.

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