ABSTRACT
Giselinde Kuipers suggests that it was in 2001 in the wake of 9/11 that verbal/visual disaster jokes spread over the internet and gained ascendency over face-to-face joke-telling. The fact that so much humour on the internet is gender oriented reflects society's beliefs and attitudes. Whether women and men come from different planets or simply from different postcodes is the object of much play and inanity on the web. Undeniably, the virtual world overseen by the internet is, at least for the present, limited to sight and sound – the world online is, in effect, one that is language driven and mediated by an alphanumeric keyboard. In other words, if in reality immediate interaction involves speech and hearing, online it principally revolves around writing and reading. And it would seem, at least intuitively, that a substantial amount of this communication and more generally of content online is humorous in its intent.
