
Victorian Jokes Database - samclemens
http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/
======
gus_massa
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](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.)

~~~
cturner
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?

~~~
gus_massa
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/](http://explainxkcd.com/)

~~~
cturner
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.

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thinkpad20
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 :)

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
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.

~~~
Mahn
> 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.

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a3_nm
I find their Tumblr of latest additions more pleasant to read
[http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/](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.

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rcurry
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.

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tomlong
From
[http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/joke/19](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.

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vanilla-almond
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFNK-3lZ1U)

(video annoyingly rotated presumably to avoid copyright detection)

~~~
tim333
Also the novel 'Flashman' is quite good really.

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sirhumalot
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.

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gjm11
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.)

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68VXKMZT1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68VXKMZT1Q)

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geon
This really needs an explainvictorianhumor.com.

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

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

~~~
staticautomatic
[http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/?offset=0&paging=5000](http://victorianhumour.com/jokedb/?offset=0&paging=5000)
plus a negligible amount of scraping code.

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

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lxw
someone please train a character based RNN to generate these

