Where do jokes come from?

So, where do jokes come from? They seem to circulate endlessly, with no begining or end. What do you guys think?

Isaac Asimov showed that jokes are introduced by aliens as part of a human psychology experiment. Further, once humans discover this, the aliens will abandon the experiment and there will be no more jokes.

France. Zey come from France. Oui, Oui! :smiley:

Mark Twain said that;

“The secret source of all humor is sorrow.”

The more jokes that I write and tell, the more I believe that this is true. You have the choice to laugh or cry, laughter is by far the best medicine.

“We are all born crying, some of us learn to stop.”

In a serious vein(sorry), I think that professional joke writers, such as those who work for tv personalities such as Johnny Carson(used to be, I know) come up with many of the current jokes, say, since the 50’s. Jay Leno obviously spends much time coming up with his original jokes for his nightly show. I’d be surprised if there isn’t a book/source to validate my theory.

What? I have to go find the source? Yikes! Gloriosky!

This is an easy one.

news:alt.tastless.jokes

Steve Allen once tried to get to the bottom of this. He mostly was trying to find the source of ‘blue’ jokes seeing as how Carson’s writers, and the like, didn’t write them and comedians (like himself) didn’t write jokes, per se, especially dirty ones.
His first guess, prisoners, turned out to be a dead end - lots of prisoners knew dirty jokes but no one claimed to write or know someone who had written even one. Being closely associated with the comedy biz and having the time and means he brought the full weight of his connections to bear on this question. To no avail. After lots of time researching he came up empty-handed and very frustrated.
David Brenner was once asked this question and he also had no ideas and after a little research also came up snake-eyes. He related on ‘The Tonight Show’ that he didn’t no of one comedian who had written what he called ‘street jokes’.
It’s always been a mystery to me, too. If you consider the millions of jokes floating around and no one claiming to write them, well it’s a mind boggelin’ thang!
Since 1 out of every 5 of my friends hasn’t written a joke, there has got to be one busy joke writing rascle out there somewhere.

They crossed the road.

A duck.

It nevers fails- as soon as there’s a crisis or disaster, within days, EVERYONE in the country is telling the exact same jokes. Within days of the Challenger explosion, there were dozens of CHrista McAuliffe jokes, and no one knew where they came from.

I recall that, around 1985 or 86, New York magazine had an article trying to track down the source of the post-Chernobyl gag “Q: What clucks and glows in the dark? A: Chicken Kiev.”

Though the author of the joke was never found, the magazine writer found that people all over the country had heard it during phone calls to/from Wall Stree brokers. Though there’s no way to tell who created the joke, it appeared that Wall Street was the distribution center!

Today, of coure, tracing a joke is all but impossible- thanks to the Internet/e-mail, millions of people receive the latest jokes in a matter of hours.

In the same vein, I heard the “What kind of wood doesn’t float?” joke (riddle, actually) ONE day after Natalie’s tragic drowning. That’s fast.

A quick search came up with this page:

It doesn’t completely answer the question, but it provides some interesting survey results.