Question: What is this website about?
Answer: See “About” page. (Psst, over here! I’ll tell you. Amanwalked.com is a webcomic, although it used to be about bar jokes. Oh, and sandwiches.)

Question: I read some of those old bar jokes. Unfortunately. Isn’t the traditional syntax supposed to be, “A man walks into a bar?” You wrote, “A man walked…”
Answer: Possibly.* However, for aesthetic and practical (and maybe even legal) reasons, the management team** of Amanwalked.com decided to eschew the traditional present tense formulation of those jokes, in preference for the past tense; the reasons were as follows:

  1. The past is much funnier than the present. Hence, the well-known aphorism, “We’ll laugh about this later.” Also, there’s a lot more of it.
  2. The usage of past tense implies a temporal distance between the teller of a joke and the joke itself, a distance which the teller of these jokes will happily exploit, should public opinion prove overwhelmingly negative.*** For example: “Dear angry mob, I’m sorry you were bored and/or offended by that joke; the truth is, it happened so very long ago…”
  3. Grammar snobs (read: readers) often consider the past tense more sophisticated (read: pretentious), because it gives the impression (read: illusion) of having aged like a fine wine (read: fancy grapes). They also rightly understand that the present tense, much like chainsaw juggling, is only a gimmick.
  4. The jokes contained herein were neither conceived, nor composed, with any sense of immediacy; therefore, it would be creatively dishonest to pretend otherwise, like trying to pass off an emu as that supermodel from Canada you supposedly met while backpacking through the medical conference you chaired on the way to receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from a charity no one’s ever heard of or cares to fact-check you about. Sure, it might work, especially if you find the right cocktail dress, but the feathers will eventually give the game away.
  5. The website’s domain registration was purchased prematurely.

Question: May I claim credit for these jokes or reproduce them without your express written consent?
Answer: Of course you can’t. That’s called plagiarism or, simply, being an @$$hole. See copyright. See it! SEE IT!
Follow-Up Question: These jokes are stupid, so I wouldn’t want to, anyway.
Follow-Up Answer: That wasn’t a question.

Question: What about the comics? May I reproduce them?
Answer: Perhaps, if you ask nicely.

Question: Aren’t comics and prepackaged jokes the lowest forms of humor?
Answers: It depends on where you read them.

Question: Do you have any capacity for original thought?
Answer: It was W.B. Yeats who said…****

Question: Do you like wasting your time?
Answer: This is beginning to take a harsh turn…

Question: May I use you and your life decisions as cautionary examples for my children?
Answer: This is about the emu comment, isn’t it?

*According to a study, recently conducted by this website’s underpaid non-existent highly professional research team, mostly on Wikipedia, “syntax” (pronounced zhá’nòtərp1) has something to do with another word called “grammar” (pronounced cheese2).
**There is no management team. Well, unless there is an “i” in “team,” in which case, the team is I. Er, I mean, me.
***Negative public opinion is typically marked by a noticeable increase in pitchfork sales.
****Actually, I don’t know what W.B. Yeats said — is poetry supposed to make sense? — but some guy named C.S. Lewis once wrote, “No man who bothers about originality will ever be original.” Thank you, Google.

1Pronounced with 18 glottal stops.
2Pronounced just like “cheese.” In fact, the two words are homophones. This can become awfully confusing when trying to parse a block of Limburger.

© 2016 Tony Vicory.

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