Bulk Humor
Bulk HumorThese are the long lists of lawyer jokes or dumb blond jokes that get forwarded around the net. There might even be a funny joke or two among them but you're not in the mood to laugh when you still have forty five unread emails in your inbox.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3638/forwarded_lawyer_jokes.html
The funniest thing on that page was the "Email this story" button at the bottom. And it wasn't intentional -- all the Onion pages have the same button.
See WhoWritesJokes
Who says Blonde jokes aren't funny?
http://www.thehumorarchives.com/humor/0000769.html
I uncovered some old family home movies from around 1990. There are three separate instances on the six-hour tape where people just start rattling off blonde jokes. --NickBensema
One problem with blonde jokes is that they have just become a politically acceptable way to recycle many of the ethnic and sexist jokes from times past. Many of these jokes are really just about a "stupid person", and one can easily substitute a person of some despised racial, ethnic, or political group, and the jokes still "work" with an audience that shares the teller's bigotry. Lawyer jokes can be used in the same way to target groups regarded as "greedy", "unprincipled", etc.
My sister-in-law is a blonde lawyer. My father has lots of fun telling jokes while she's around.
A common trait of BulkHumor is that in a list of 200 jokes, you'll see the same joke at least three times -- usually the most obvious and unfunny one.
To get the most out of bulk humor, pick your favorite two or three jokes and slip them into spoken conversation, one at a time, if the opportunity presents itself. Reading them silently ruins the sense of timing, but if you tell it aloud, you can pause a little between the Q part and the A part. If nobody guesses the A part before you deliver it, then the joke might be considered clever.
Related to this are BulkHugs? whereby people you have previously taken to be intelligent, sensible and considerate develop the need to regularly mail around forwards containing nauseating passages on friendship, usually featuring repeated images of hearts, teddy bears and other cute and cuddly icons. Bleurgh.
New example of this is LolCats?, which are unlike one-liners in that they can occur in bulk (bad, tiresome, bandwidth-intensive), or one at a time (good, thoughtful, adorable).
Related to the previous comment but not to this topic per se: This may offend some RC's out there but one of the main reasons I don't like attending mass for obligatory family functions which would otherwise be quite pleasant, is the newly traditional exchanging of the "Handshake of Peace", the human equivalent of the chain BulkHugs?. A few moments of silent thinking about peace or working out a real solution to world peace would probably serve more purpose and fewer germs would be exchanged.
It's not just RCs. Lutherans do this as well (of course, Lutherans are just Protestant Catholics...)
Bulk humor often comes not in lists, but not just any lists. Sure, sometimes people take the trouble to compile a list of disparate jokes through the magic of CopyAndPaste, but in the case of bullet-list one-liners, certain kinds of lists keep popping up:
ImageBoards? have spawned the "Everyone post ___" threads, which are just as often pictures as text. And since not everyone owns Photoshop, the pictures are likely to be pictures you've seen before the last time that thread was posted.
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(last edited March 5, 2008)
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