Mayank Gupta begins his day with a laugh. Not a laugh, really. More like something between the horn of a truck and a band of street singers yelling; a laugh that takes a lot of getting used to. Fortunately for me, I know it well by now and cover my ears the minute I see him grinning into his screen.
Slowly, people around me smile. In a couple of minutes, Mayank’s not the only one roaring with laughter. The office roars with him.
Takes me back to my first day at the office. I was nervously fiddling with my keyboard when suddenly, without warning, Mayank did his thing. I died of shock. When I looked around though, the look on his face made things easier to handle almost at once.
But, I digress. This is about jokes. Jokes online, rather. When I think of Mayank, his laughter, and the chain reaction that ensues, I realise that these little bits of text travelling from PC to PC around the world do more than occupy some Web space. They ease a nervous wreck somewhere in Manhattan, break the ice at another place in Mumbai, make people giggle into their computer screens in Finland, take away those Monday morning blues in London and, in a nutshell, give us all a little something to smile about.
Which is why it came as no surprise to find out that Mayank was hardly an exception. It was I who lay on the outside.
Today, I’ve become as much of an addict to jokes as he. And I’ve realised that the guy who said “blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused”, didn’t know what he was talking about. I have lots to keep myself amused without having to smirk at myself, thanks to the Internet.
Think of the remotest subject under the sun and there’s probably a joke about it. There are favourites though, like lawyers, whom nobody seems to want to spare: Q. What's wrong with lawyer jokes? A. Lawyers don't think they're funny and other people don't think they're jokes.
Blonde jokes are popular too, if only with those who have a taste for this sort of thing: Two blondes are on opposite sides of a lake. One yells to the other, “How do you get to the other side?” “You are on the other side,” the other yells back.
There are jokes about men and women that would be funny, if they weren’t so tragic. And jokes on personalities from Saddam Hussein to Bill Gates.
No one can deny that jokes have always been popular, but who could have thought they would inspire a British scientist to launch a search for the world’s funniest joke? The huge experiment aims to collect thousands of jokes that will be assessed according to how funny they are.
I’m a staunch supporter of the funny tribe now. I walk in every morning, switch on my PC, and head for the jokes. They appear, one by one, bandwidth permitting. Then I stop reading, throw my head back, and laugh like a maniac.
Mayank looks at me, and smiles. I even managed to throw one of the funnies at him, once. “Last time I saw a face like yours I fed it a banana.” He knows he’s managed another convert. One that doesn’t grudge him this victory one bit.
More Like This:
-- Bumper Stickers
-- Humour sites