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Victorian Jokes Database
- sotojuan 11y agoIs there an API for these? Would be cool to make some IRC bots or CLI programs to display some of the jokes.
- staticautomatic 11y agohttp://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/?offset=0&paging=5000 http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/?offset=0&paging=5000 plus a negligible amount of scraping code.
- lazerwalker 11y agoThe site says all of the data is taken from the British Library's digital collections, which I'd imagine would have an API.
- elipsey 11y agoThese are much funnier if I imagine them being read by Buzz Killington. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68VXKMZT1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68VXKMZT1Q
- gus_massa 11y agoThe page is not very clear, but it has only an snippet of the joke. For example, the first one is > Two naval officers were disputing as to the importance of Lord Nelson's victories. They wereunable to agree in opin I didn't get the joke. Is "opin" an old English word? Until I realize the number has a link to the complete joke: http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/joke/1 http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/joke/1 I think that adding a few "..." dots at the end with a link will be more discoverable. (Bonus points for changing the color to grey so the sentence vanish instead of stopping suddenly.)
- DyslexicAtheist 11y agoagreed the UI is pretty bad. Generally having this material is awesome. Would be great to have a format that lets you rate jokes to get some better ranking of the funnier ones.
- memco 11y agoIt would also be good for there to be a process for cleaning up the translations so they flow better in modern English.
- cturner 11y agoNihil means nothing in latin. The punchline is a pun on Battle of the Nile (see wikipedia). It may seem bizarre, but is less so because Nelson is already associated with latin in victorian popular culture because of his supposed final words. Can someone explain #2 for me?
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoI think #2 is supposed to be "wisdom". Note the OCR errors, eg "so;" is rendered "soj". It's still not entirely clear to me what the point of the passage is however, it is IMO poorly written. https://archive.org/details/bookhumourwitwi00projgoog https://archive.org/details/bookhumourwitwi00projgoog is the text "Humour, Wit and Wisdom" - "the latter days of Bonaparte" is on p.2.
- gus_massa 11y agoPerhaps I was not clear. I thought that the joke ended in "opin". I read it a few times, thinking that it didn't continue beyond "opin". Then I notice the link and that the joke continue. Anyway, thanks for the explanations, because I didn't get all the details. Perhaps they can add an explanation wiki like http://explainxkcd.com/ http://explainxkcd.com/
- cturner 11y agoThanks. I was recovering from three days of sickess, so at least most of the gap was at my side. Yeah - an explain link would be a worthwhile project for someone with some time or an interest in building a small webapp, and useful.
- gjm11 11y agoIt's worth noting that despite the title quite a lot of these are not actually jokes. (Several others are, to my mind, merely not actually funny, but that's no surprise; tastes in humour evolve.)
- thinkpad20 11y agoWow, these jokes are as dry as day old toast. Would people have really laughed at these back then? I read 5 or 6 of them and many of them don't even make sense, let alone are funny. Still, I'm glad to have them preserved, it's a window into the past :)
- ketralnis 11y agoFlip through a modern joke book at a book store some time. They're pretty awful. I think it's just that one-liners told in isolation aren't funny on their own.
- binarymax 11y agoAgreed. I contrast this with the jokes in the Big Book of Jewish Humor. It has jokes going back to the schtetl days of the 1880s, that are still pretty hilarious.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 11y agoI read the first few and dry is being polite. Wasn't this the age when people were turned on by seeing a woman's exposed ankle? I wonder what their reaction would have been to today's jokes and short shorts. Seems people were both easily amused and aroused back then. It is wonderful to have this archive though, agreed.
- Mahn 11y ago> I wonder what their reaction would have been to today's jokes They'd get on reddit, see a couple of mundane image macros memes of the lines of "WENT TO THE BATHROOM — DIDN'T PEE", and conclude that humanity has gone downhill horribly humor-wise.
- DonHopkins 11y agoI apologize, Your Majesty, but the whole tenor of this conversation is completely out of keeping with contemporary morals! [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4p0uw42cdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4p0uw42cdo
- deleted 11y ago
- vanilla-almond 11y agoFor more modern humour poking fun at the Victorians, there's the brilliant BBC children's series Horrible Histories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFNK-3lZ1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFNK-3lZ1U (video annoyingly rotated presumably to avoid copyright detection)
- tim333 11y agoAlso the novel 'Flashman' is quite good really.
- krzrak 11y agoPart of the dry joke is that they show the exact microsecond the entry was added?
- geon 11y agoThis really needs an explainvictorianhumor.com.
- tomlong 11y agoFrom http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/joke/19 http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/joke/19 -- "Ihad [sic] always a high opinion of your seamen," said Napoleon one day" .. these Victorians had definitely mastered the single entendre.
- lxw 11y agosomeone please train a character based RNN to generate these
- a3_nm 11y agoI find their Tumblr of latest additions more pleasant to read http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/ http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/ -- possibly because the jokes are handpicked and correctly transcribed. It's still not very funny (but non-funny in an interesting way), but at least it's often understandable.
- rcurry 11y agoThis is a great idea, but you need to fix the navigation on that page - having to click on those tiny numbers off to the left is really frustrating. Also, as 'gus_massa' points out in his comment, having the summaries trail off with an ellipsis would also make things easier to understand.
- sirhumalot 11y agoThe Book of Humour, Wit & Wisdom. Seems like all the jokes come from here. Why not randomize or have an option to dig without hitting the next button? You can change the offset number in the URL, although that is not what I would call a friendly database interface.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoThe website is very raw. Joke #1 has messed up punctuation which hurts its reception. You usually at least make first things good.