Joke Chain Letters

the barrel of bricks urban legend discussed on this blog

Humor comes in so many forms, from pranks to tongue-in-cheek making fun.

Of course, it should be little surprise that chain letters exploit our need for a good laugh as well, so there are chain letters for every type of humor out there.

HELP! I'M AN IDIOT - mirror.co.uk

The difference between a joke, and a joke chain letter is that simply telling a joke in person or watching a standup comic is actually funny.

Getting joke chain letters, however, becomes annoying very quickly, especially when a certain joke, quiz, animation, etc. becomes popular enough to circulate so that it pops up everywhere, from unrelated sources.

Take for example, the Healthy Level of Insanity joke chain letter. It gets circulated around and around via email, and now in addition, it is cropping up on blogs. It has made the search on Google for "Disguise your voice" practically useless, because one of the suggestions in the chain email includes the phrase "Don't disguise your voice."

People are constantly sending joke forwards all over the internet, thinking they are so hilarious and so original.

Well, yes - maybe they are the first time you get them in your inbox or Facebook/Myspace etc. or see them on some web forum, but not when you get the same joke fwd eight different times from eight different people, especially within a short amount of time.

It's also worth looking into the validity of the joke if it's in the form of a story. Believe it or not, a lot of supposedly funny stories and pictures passed around in chain letter forwards are only partly true, distorted, or completely fabricated, and people end up believing and laughing at nonsense made up about particular companies, celebrities, products etc.

The only difference between a false joke fwd about a certain product/company/person and a scary warning hoax about it is that one's trying to be funny so you will forward it all over the internet, and the other's trying to be scary or outrageous enough so you will forward it, even if it's completely bogus.

Other joke fwds aren't false stories about specific people, companies or products, but they're still annoying just because they are chain letters. When you send it on, you don't know how many times your recipients have already seen it.

Fire chief in trouble for sending a tasteless joke chain letter

The "I've Been Arrested" joke was paired with the Friends Are Like Butt Cheeks"joke and put into one forward that was received in August 2009.