Edition: U.S. / Global

Take These Jokes . . . Please

Published: July 15, 1999

HOW many jokes has Gary Lewis sent by E-mail in the last month?

Like a lot of jokes that circulate on the Internet, it isn't even funny.

Mr. Lewis, an architect who lives in Lake Mohegan, N.Y., is a human hub on what may be the Internet's most far-flung network: joke tellers and their electronically captive audiences. Mr. Lewis's modest goal is to put a little laughter into the lives of his 32 or so closest friends and acquaintances.

Lately, however, some of his material hasn't been going over so well.

''Some people have asked to be taken off the list,'' Mr. Lewis said ruefully. ''You start seeing the same jokes over and over again. So I try to do the right thing and spend more time editing. But then you think, 'Is this really funny? Which joke is more appropriate for this particular person?' It's easier trying to design a very complicated building.''

As anyone with an E-mail address knows, one of the most popular uses of the Internet has little to do with electronic commerce or real-time stock quotes. Jokes are often the first E-mail new Internet subscribers receive and, in time, the most common. That's partly because they are so easy to tell. Forget the setup and timing -- just click on the Forward button on your E-mail program and you're a regular comedian.

Internet joke-telling is developing as an art unto itself, with its own customs, critics and avant-garde. One video clip on the E-mail circuit shows an animated monkey in the passenger seat of a car boogeying to music from the radio, next to an apparently oblivious human driver. If that doesn't sound funny, take it from those who have their computers set to play it over and over -- it is.

Even as new joke forms develop, a debate has broken out among some of the computer network's more sophisticated jesters over whether the Internet mode of distribution is destroying the age-old essence of humor, and, if so, what to do about it. At stake, some say gravely, is the future of the joke itself.

''The volume diminishes the impact of a good joke,'' said Al Paster, 70, a retired computer programmer who frequently replies to Mr. Lewis's E-mail jokes by correcting their punchlines. In a gesture toward quality control, Mr. Paster refuses to pass on E-jokes. ''What really disturbs me is when the jokes I know -- and I know quite a few -- are changed for the worse,'' he said. ''I predict the death of humor by the millennium.''

Others have noticed a pall settling over off-line humor as a result of the Internet's unparalleled capacity for joke propagation.

''I'm going out to dinner tonight with people and normally any lull in the conversation I could fill in because I knew five new jokes,'' said David Perlmutter, a New York lawyer who has 43 addresses on his joke list. ''Now the only way they don't know those jokes is if they haven't read my E-mail. It's socially depressing.''

On the other hand, more people are telling jokes than ever before.

Take Peter Coan, a typically reserved architect in Ghent, N.Y., who stunned friends at a dinner party last month by telling a banjo joke he found on the Internet. (The difference between a banjo player and a Treasury note? Eventually a Treasury note matures and earns money.)

''This is abnormal for me,'' acknowledged Mr. Coan, who took to the Internet in search of jokes shortly after his wife took up banjo playing. ''I'm not that interested in jokes. I know two or three jokes and I can't even remember them. But these rang true.''

Certainly, the Internet allows for convenient sorting of jokes by category. There are Web sites featuring frog jokes, lawyer jokes, light bulb jokes, Microsoft jokes and, of course, Star Trek Lost Episodes. But by releasing the sender from the obligation of actually uttering the words, some humor experts say, the carbon-copy nature of the Internet zaps the hidden level of meaning that makes jokes funny.

''Joke-telling allows us to get away with saying things that are taboo, impolite, politically incorrect,'' said Lawrence E. Mintz, director of the Art Kliner Center for Humor Studies at the University of Maryland. ''Internet jokes lose that value because the teller doesn't have the personal commitment to the joke. People send whole strings of jokes that they have no commitment to.''

Dispatched along with the oral tradition are the tone of voice and overall delivery that are so often the key to getting laughs. The ability to scroll down to the punchline tends to undermine even the best setup.

But Internet humorists may be injecting meaning into their material in new ways. Because of the concentric circles through cyberspace that most jokes seem destined to travel, a sense of community with strangers often develops among a given joke's thousands of recipients. And there is heightened competition to be the first to relay a good one -- a more difficult task when everyone is connected.

''I sent a technology joke yesterday to a principal in a management consulting firm in Los Angeles,'' said a manager at a financial services firm who asked that his name be withheld because his company prohibits sending jokes over its E-mail system. Later, the recipient got the same joke from Esther Dyson, the technology pundit. ''Can you believe it?'' he said. ''I beat her.''

Since many companies have cracked down on the jokes stampeding through their corporate networks, sending them requires a dedication by employees to flout the rules or spend evenings at home giggling into the screen.

''They don't want us doing this but I say, I'm doing it anyway,'' another surreptitious joker said, referring to his employer. ''They can only control my life up to a point.'

Standards are being raised, too, by the challenge of getting onto premier distribution lists. Joke mavens who take themselves seriously forward only a small portion of the jokes that reach their E-mail In box.

At rec.humor.funny, a venerable newsgroup devoted to jokes, fewer than 2 percent of submissions make the cut. ''On average I accept one per day, and on a busy day I can receive as many as 100,'' said Jim Griffith, the moderator. ''A lot of them are jokes we've seen before. And a lot of people aren't as funny as they think they are.''

For Andrew Gelb, a lawyer in Los Angeles who began receiving floods of jokes as soon as he got an Internet account last fall, E-mail jokes offer a dimension others do not: headers that offer clues to their provenance.

''I like to look at the long list in the message to see who else got the joke,'' Mr. Gelb said. ''I get a kick out of how fast and how far these things travel.'

A list of one-liners, for instance, reached Mr. Gelb recently from Carollee Krueger, a fellow wine aficionado in Santa Monica, Calif. Ms. Krueger received the joke from Mr. Lewis, the architect, who got it from Mark Paine, an I.B.M. consultant who lives in North Salem, N.Y. Mr. Paine received it from Tom Dietsche, a chemist at Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich., who got it from a colleague in another building, who got it from his brother David Czerepinski, a junior high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., who got it from Warren Avery, a computer salesman in Tempe, Ariz., who hit it off with Mr. Czerepinski last year at his wife's high school reunion and has been sending him jokes ever since.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this exercise (or not), Mr. Avery had deleted his joke archive the day before he talked to a reporter and could not recall the joke in question.

In earlier times, jokes were thought to spread as traveling salesmen pollinated their customers with one another's humor. Pre-Internet, the phone was the most efficient distribution tool, wielded with particular proficiency by Wall Street traders, who were credited, among other things, with some of the more tasteless attempts at humor that followed the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Now joke trackers say they see a growing body of original material from all types of individuals. And with each link in an E-mail chain forwarding jokes to dozens of others, jokes flit across the world in a matter of hours.

''It's like the Industrial Revolution of jokes,'' said Dave Barry, whose humor column for The Miami Herald is distributed widely on the Internet. ''Instead of doing something useful with your day, you're probably reading a joke. And you've noticed that at the same time there's been this huge explosion of jokes going around, there's also been this huge surge in the economy.''

Whatever the impact on the gross national product, Barry Wellman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, said Internet joke-sending played a role in maintaining relationships that might not otherwise be sustained.

''Jokes are a way of reaffirming a connection with somebody,'' said Mr. Wellman, who has his own archive of 748 jokes and a list of more than 100 people to whom he sends good ones that roll in. ''Before E-mail, what did people do? They did nothing or they sent a Christmas letter. Jokes serve as a Christmas card, but they come much more often because it's really easy.''

Trea Graham, 57, could do without the weekly Christmas cards from her son, a naval engineer. A recent dispatch included some dog haiku that she thought was funny, but she said she would rather get E-mail he had written himself.

''If you asked him, 'Francis Spencer, are you contacting your mother a lot?' he would say yes because he's pushing a button and going 'Forward to Mom,' '' Ms. Graham said. ''Well, it's not the same thing.''

The same liberal forwarding attitude has caused other kinds of offense to be taken as well.

''People feel free to be more edgy or sexist or racist because they feel less responsible for the joke,'' said Patrice Oppliger, a lecturer at Northeastern University who is studying joke-sending habits. ''People who would never tell these jokes face to face send them out en masse.''

That's nothing a little technology can't solve. A Web site called Jester, for instance, uses ''collaborative filtering'' techniques to recommend jokes based on user ratings of a set of samples (shadow.ieor.berkeley.edu /humor).

''Humor is a very difficult thing to characterize,'' said Ken Goldberg, who is one of the site's designers and an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley. ''The computer treats all jokes as numbers.''

Of course, there has already been considerable evolution of the Internet joke form. One of the first computers to be connected to the nascent Internet in 1973 offered off-color limericks on request. Anyone who contributed three new ones received a copy of the entire database.

Since then, the Internet has proved hospitable to more elaborate jokes. A longtime rule that mandates a punchline after 15 or 20 seconds, or you lose your audience, doesn't apply in a medium where jokes are meant to be read instead of heard. Long lists, like the Top 26 Children's Books Not Recommended by the National Library Association (No. 25: ''The Little Engine That Could Becomes Intoxicated and Kills Civilians''), are thus more plentiful.

Not surprisingly, technology jokes, particularly the Microsoft subgenre, have found an appreciative audience on the Internet. (Microsoft acquires the Vatican, Christmas, the year 1995, the rights to all further ''Microsoft Acquires'' announcements and so on.) ''Not only do you have more people on line,'' said Mr. Griffith, the newsgroup moderator. ''But you have more people who understand why Microsoft-bashing is funny.''

And jokes that might never find an audience off line have suddenly become worth telling on the Internet. One of Mr. Griffith's favorites involves the chemical cesium: ''With the Internet there are enough people out there who appreciate cesium humor,'' he said.

Photo: Gary Lewis, of Lake Mohegan, N.Y., sends jokes regularly to a list of 32 family members and friends. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times)(pg. 1) Drawing (James Yang)(pg. 8)