Victorian Jokes Database | Hacker News Reader

Victorian Jokes Database

victorianhumour.com

67 pointssamclemens35 comments

The 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

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.)

Nihil 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?

Perhaps 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/

Thanks. 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.

I 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 is the text "Humour, Wit and Wisdom" - "the latter days of Bonaparte" is on p.2.

agreed 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.

It would also be good for there to be a process for cleaning up the translations so they flow better in modern English.

Wow, 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 :)

Maybe the Victorians just weren't good at humour? I was thinking maybe we don't get them because they are old but Mark Twain lived pretty much over the Victorian period (Twain 1845-1910, Victoria's reign 1837-1901) and he's pretty funny.

He didn't seem to think so much of England at the time - “I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”

Flip 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.

Just as a point for consideration, look at the television variety shows broadcast back in the 50's. Simple slapstick humour, such as tripping over or crashing through a drywall brought huge amounts of laughter from the audience. If that happened today, the only laughter you'd hear would be from the laugh track.

My only immediate reference is Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary", which apparently just falls within Victorian Time:

http://www.ambrosebierce.org/dictionary.htm

(Available on Debian-derived systems via "apt-get install dict-devil")

Agreed. 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.

I 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.

> 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.

Have you read My Secret Life? This was the age when caning boys was the thing to do, when Venus In Furs was written, when homosexuality was first introduced to public life since the end of Rome. Their pornography was about desire frustrated, because that is sexy.

http://the-toast.net/2014/04/10/pearl-victorian-porn-finest/

I 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

> Wow, 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.

We are not amused.

Apparently she never said this!

That was pretty much the opposite of "that's what she said!".

I find their Tumblr of latest additions more pleasant to read 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.

This 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.

From 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.

For 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

(video annoyingly rotated presumably to avoid copyright detection)

Also the novel 'Flashman' is quite good really.

The 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.

It'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.)

These are much funnier if I imagine them being read by Buzz Killington.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68VXKMZT1Q

This really needs an explainvictorianhumor.com.

The website is very raw. Joke #1 has messed up punctuation which hurts its reception. You usually at least make first things good.

Is there an API for these? Would be cool to make some IRC bots or CLI programs to display some of the jokes.

http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/?offset=0&paging=5000 plus a negligible amount of scraping code.

The site says all of the data is taken from the British Library's digital collections, which I'd imagine would have an API.

Part of the dry joke is that they show the exact microsecond the entry was added?

someone please train a character based RNN to generate these

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