Hit 'Send' And the World Laughs With You

The camera cuts to a close-up of the female cop, whose face is hideous.

The drunk looks at her, grinning lasciviously, then answers with an enthusiastic "Aye!"

Wrong! He's failed the sobriety test.

"Cuff him," the male cop says.

George Ramick laughs. "That's terrible!" he says. It's crass. But he's still laughing.

Ramick is sitting at the computer in his Rockville basement, clicking through the archives of the amazing and amusing stuff he e-mails to his friends, who e-mail it to their friends, who e-mail it to their friends, who . . .

At 61, Ramick is retired from the Department of Transportation and having a great time. With his white hair and white beard, he looks like Papa Hemingway -- or like Hemingway would have looked if he'd said, "Ah, the heck with this cockamamie Great American Novel hoo-hah" and decided to just enjoy his retirement.

Ramick scrolls through his e-mails. He clicks on one. On his computer screen a construction worker shuffles into a Port-a-Potty. The Port-a-Potty collapses. The construction worker crawls out, covered with extremely unpleasant substances.

Ramick scrolls. Click. Up pops a gallery of fictitious Air Force medals, including the "Missed Every Deployment Ribbon," decorated with a smiley face, and the "Drinking Buddy's Commendation Ribbon," decorated with a martini glass.

Ramick scrolls. Click. Up pops what looks like a formal oil painting of our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton, looking solemn and presidential. But wait. What's that movement in the lower left corner? Oops! It's the head of Monica bobbing up from below the desk. Clinton pushes the head back down. He's trying desperately to maintain his solemnity, but the head keeps popping up.

Ramick scrolls. This time he doesn't click. Instead, he reads the subject line on the e-mail: "Where the hell do you find these jokes?"

Good question. And the answer is: He gets them the same way you do -- they appear in his computer as if by magic, sent by relatives and friends and relative friends.

Ramick is just one link in a secret worldwide conspiracy -- a shadowy cabal of anonymous operatives working to make sure that when you check your e-mail, you'll find some bizarre bit of humor amid the ads for penis enlargers and the letters from people who promise to send you $10 million if you'll give them your bank account number.

Another secret agent of this cabal is Doug Holton, 54, a retired Air Force major now living in Florida. He's the man who supplies Ramick with many of his jokes, including those fake Air Force medals. Holton gets the stuff from military pals all over the world.

"People used to stand around the water cooler and tell jokes," he says. "Now we have home computers to do it."

"What you're seeing on the Internet is the next step in folk humor," says Mark Schaffer, co-author of "The Office Humor Book," a 1985 collection of Xeroxed humor. "The new technology is creating a new network for anonymous humor."

"It's modern folklore," Alan Dundes, professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, said shortly before he died March 30. "The Internet shows that folklore isn't dead. It's just gone from face-to-face stuff to the computer."

Dundes, who was among America's most famous and prolific folklorists, loved Internet humor and he eagerly forwarded jokes to a wide circle of friends, sometimes adding comments identifying the gags as modern variations of some thousand-year-old fable or folk tale or Bible story.

"The new technology has improved the quality of the images," he said, "but the themes are the same -- idiotic bosses, impotence, domineering women, etc., etc."

Like all humor, Internet humor is not always actually, you know, funny. Many Internet jokes are nasty or sexist or vulgar or childish or bigoted or obnoxious or obscene. The rest are no good at all.

Good, bad or just plain ugly, this stuff keeps on coming -- whether you want it or not. The sheer volume is a tribute to the bizarre creativity -- if not the good taste -- of the human animal.

Ah, humanity! A bunch of primates with opposable thumbs and extremely efficient cerebral cortexes invent the Internet and what do the rest of the primates do? They use this epochal breakthrough in communications technology to send out dirty pictures or low humor or, better yet, dirty pictures with low humor.

The spirit of Internet humor is the same spirit that inspired that ancient anonymous bard to take out a pen and write on the outhouse wall: Here I sit, broken-hearted . . . E-mailed humor is the graffiti on the modern-day latrine that is the Internet.

Of course, the humor has evolved as computer technology improved. At first, most Internet humor was simply jokes typed out: blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, redneck jokes, cat jokes, ethnic jokes and tired, ancient jokes about over-sexed old wives and their under-sexed old husbands.

But as it became easier to send images by e-mail, visual gags and strange photos appeared: The redneck wedding picture with the pregnant bride with the cigarette and the toothless groom in the sleeveless tux. The parodies of the new state quarters: "Nevada -- Warning: The chlamydia you got in Vegas will not actually 'stay in Vegas.' " The series of goofy homemade mailboxes. The series of "only in . . . " pictures poking fun at certain locales. The photo of an enormous fat guy wearing a T-shirt that says, "I Beat Anorexia."

Now, the advent of computers that can download video quickly has led to Internet jokes that are elaborate mini-movies:

The video of the obnoxious kid throwing a temper tantrum in a supermarket that ends with the sage advice: "Use condoms."

Or the mock commercial with a housewife touting the wonders of a certain home-improvement catalogue -- which she slowly rolls into a club and uses to whack her lazy husband, who's napping on the couch.

Or the movie of a frail old lady pushing her walker through an urban wasteland, looking nervous. A couple of punks zoom past on a scooter and grab her handbag. They stop to taunt her, holding up the handbag. She pulls out an electronic device and presses a button. Boom! Her handbag explodes, vaporizing the punks.

"The level of technical sophistication is unbelievable," says Schaffer, the "Office Humor" author. But he worries about the effect of Internet humor on a far older form of humor dissemination: jokes.

"People don't tell jokes anymore," he says. "The oral culture is dying out."

Ramick has noticed the same thing. "People I know don't tell a lot of jokes," he says. "They'll say, 'Remember those jokes I sent you? I really liked the second one.' And you'll laugh at that."

But Dundes saw Internet humor as a boon to the kind of people who were too shy to tell jokes in public. "Now all you need to do is push a button," he said. "And it has made jokes more international. They go all over the world now."

Internet humor is also an outlet for people who like humor that's obscene or offensive. The kind of Xeroxed material Schaffer collected for his book now might be considered verboten. "You can't drop a cartoon on a co-worker's desk anymore because you might get fired or you might get sued for sexual harassment," he says.

Internet technology is so cheap and easy to use, Schaffer says, that it has led to a populist revolution in entertainment.

"People are taking entertainment back from the media," he says. "People are entertaining themselves and their friends rather than being entertained by professionals. And the technology is allowing them to do it."

Meanwhile, George Ramick is still sitting at his computer. His feet, clad in white sneakers, are up on his desk and he leans back in his chair, scrolling and clicking.

Click. On his computer screen a country singer croons a song whose refrain goes, "I just don't look good naked anymore."

Click. Another country singer, this one singing about the painful physical problems he's suffering -- caused by his wife, who apparently got a little peeved on the day she accidentally met his girlfriend.

Click. It's comedian Chris Rock, starring in a video that teaches black folks how to avoid getting beaten up by cops.

Click. It's a video of a guy on a stage, playing "God Bless America" by throwing little balls at the keys of a piano.

Ramick laughs. "This is what you call a novelty act," he says. "You don't see this on Ed Sullivan anymore."

He's right. Ed Sullivan has passed on to the great variety show in the sky. But the good news is: The Internet makes Everyman his own Ed Sullivan -- producing, with just a few mouse clicks, a goofy variety show that will be coming soon to a computer near you.

One of the "only in . . ." images making the rounds. E-mail has supplanted the office watercooler as joke central.Photos of goofy homemade mailboxes are a staple of e-mail humor inventory.