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geek humour

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Q: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? A: Make me one with everything.

Everyone likes a good joke, perhaps you did not like that one as much as I did, which is why you should get yourself to Jester: The Online Joke Recommender (shadow.ieor.berkeley.edu/humor), where the site authors are trying to answer the question: is humour universal? One of the interesting things about the Online Joke Recommender is that it is not built by a couple of spotty geeks running a Web site from their parents' cellar; it is run by a lot of spotty geeks operating from University of California at Berkeley, not known for its pursuit of the frivolous - despite its location.

They have built a computer programme which will recommend jokes it thinks you will like based on your ratings of sample funnies. This is, of course, an indication that the folk at The Online Joke Recommender have too much time on their hands. Those of you who have visited a site like Amazon.com will be familiar with collaborative filtering: the system Amazon.com uses to recommend books to you based on your ratings of other books and what you have already purchased. You become associated with a 'nearest neighbour'. Items that have been rated highly by the nearest neighbour are then recommended to the user.

Apparently psychological studies on the human sense of humour indicate that an individual's response to jokes is a function of social, intellectual and emotional characteristics. So what sort of background do you think you have if you find this funny: Q. What do a hurricane, a tornado, and a redneck divorce all have in common? A. Someone's going to lose their trailer ...

Log on to Jester and you will be asked to rate a set of 25 jokes by clicking an on-screen meter shaded from Not Funny to Very Funny. It takes five to 10 minutes to complete - depending on how quickly you get a joke. The system then personalises jokes according to its perception of your sense of humour, which I suppose could be dispiriting if it suddenly produces a set of knock-knock jokes or half a dozen limericks. Naturally, this being the '90s - or a US site, I am not sure which - there is a warning that some of the jokes you will see 'may be considered by some to be offensive.

If you are likely to be offended by mild ethnic, sexist, or religious jokes please exit now.' So if you do not have a sense of humour, do not proceed. Mind you, it does kick off with the undeniably tasteless: Q: What's O.J. Simpson's Internet address? A: Slash, slash, backslash, slash, slash, escape. Some of the jokes, like that one, have been around a bit, in which case you are asked to rate them according to how funny they were when you heard them the first time not based on the groan factor they now hold.

Part of the fun of the site is learning a little about what you do find funny. Is it the question and answer jokes, the statement jokes, the sexist jokes, the ethnic jokes, or a combination? Do you have a sense of humour at all? Two cannibals are eating a clown, one turns to other and says: 'Does this taste funny to you?' Of course, the nice thing about being told jokes by a Web site is you do not have to sit through the tortuous delivery of most joke tellers: the jokes where an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman each walk into 25 rooms and say the same thing in all but one of them but the joke teller has to go through all 75 rooms to get to the punchline.

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