Researching Humor on the Internet

Collecting jokes on the Internet is becoming more and more useful, and one might say even unavoidable. The renewed nature of jokes (short, electronically distributed in addition to oral circulation, some jokes created only for electronic media (see Ellis 2001) etc) requires renewed methods for collecting and processing the data. Further than that, the Estonian Internet has some special advantages for collecting various folklore, including jokes. Few years after the WWW was established and began to grow, folklorists have used it as a source for their studies. Less frequent are meta-studies that analyse the theoretical concepts and practical problems are involved in this new line on research. Guidelines for this type of folkloristic research are yet unexisting. This brief overview does not attempt to do that, either, but points to the necessity to start forming and discussing the guidelines. Humour and jokes in particular are a good starting-point for this discussion because in a way humour is a „founding member“ of the Internet. The Internet was created as a means of serious communication, but became popular mostly due to its entertaining nature. But the biggest entertainer, as we all know, is humour and its various forms of appearance. The internet owns its social nature and exponential growth mainly to the playful and entertaining atmosphere generated by humour (see Kirschenblatt 1996). The Internet holds basically two types of research material: static and dynamic. The static material lacks the social clues of immediate interaction. These clues are otherwise quite inherent in the Internet that claims to be a new form of orality (Ong 1988). Of course the wider social background is still there, but features of interactivity mostly missing. It is cumulative and (if the site-owner or administrator still maintains it) all the once added material is accessible at any later point of time. The dynamic material is interactive, ie chatroom-type joke portals. But also this, as does the static material, retains its history and is thus almost like live conversation but