Again, why did the chicken cross the street?

By Carl Heintze

The Internet is a wonderful thing. It's brought me knowledge, information, entertainment, news, pictures and jokes-- lots of jokes, too many jokes.

I don't know what it is about the Internet that turns normally sober citizens into joke brokers, but it does.

This strange obsession seems to take possession of many older people, especially retirees, but there are younger jokers among my acquaintance, too. The strange thing about this phenomenon is that it strikes without warning.

Take, for example, my friend, Dave. Dave was a perfectly normal, solid, sensible physician, an internist, whose practice was what's called "carriage trade," middle-aged and older, middle-class and richer, with a fairly small collection of diseases.

For more than 30 years Dave treated his patients with charm and care.

Then he retired. About the time he retired, the Internet became readily available, so Dave hooked up and built a network which includes his large family, spread all over the United States.

Almost every day he sends his own Local Area Network a collection of email jokes, usually at least a page. He also sends them to me. I'm not sure how I got to be included with his family (probably an oversight), but I'm flattered. Except, of course, for the jokes.

Some are funny, a few are amusing, but a lot are the jokes that seem to circulate endlessly through the Internet from one retiree to another.

Another friend, an engineer, skims the cream of those he gets from his email jokester friends and passes them along to me.

A third friend, a former accountant, is more selective. He fires off his good ones about once every two weeks. Usually they are droll, at the least. But I think I've reached my limit, even of these. Enough, already.

Often there's duplication. A lot of duplication. I've speculated on how much national and international duplication there must be in the Internet joke business.

The other thing I wonder about is where the jokes come from. There seems to be an endless supply. Most aren't dirty jokes, although I suppose with the curse of pornography (another unwelcome blessing of the Internet), there may be some of these circulating, too.

Thinking about all this I was reminded of the days when it was my duty to speak to service clubs at noontime: the Lions, the Rotary, the Kiwanis and others. In my time I must have spoken to 50 or more such organizations.

They all met for lunch (I suppose they still do) and to hear a speaker who was required to be good for at least 30 minutes (less if possible and certainly not more than this time limit). The clubs had a variety of good causes to push, and still do, a chance for males to bond with one another, however briefly, and a rubbery chicken lunch to eat.

But the other thing I remember about them were the jokes. In the time when I was a reluctant noontime speaker they were mostly ethnic jokes: Polish jokes, Italian jokes and the like. Not many German jokes, though. Germans seem since World War II not to be very funny.

As I went around the service club luncheon circuit, I'd often encounter the same jokes coming from different people. After contemplating this for a while I discovered this happened because some members belonged to more than one service club. They heard jokes in one place and carried them off to the next.

If enough time elapsed, no one seemed to recognize that it was the same joke coming back to make a return visit. And since there were so many it was hard to keep track of what one had heard before.

Or perhaps it was because a lot of service club members were like me. They could remember a joke for only a day or so. After that amnesia set in and one laughed at something one vaguely recognized, but one could never remember the punch line.

That's the way it is with Internet jokes. I know I've read them before. I just don't remember who sent them to me. So I loyally download the next batch, trying to remember where I've heard that one before.

The Internet, so I have been told, was originally developed as a combination of military and university electronic webs with the serious goal of maintaining rapid communication for national defense. I wonder what the founders think of the Internet joke web. Is it funny?

I guess the jury is still out. Meantime, please don't send me any more jokes, guys. I can't remember the punch lines long enough to get them into circulation again.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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