On: Jokes that have made people laugh for thousands of...

[IgorPartola]

In these jokes, is the word intellectual meant to be a substitute for “smartass”?

[mod → IgorPartola]

Given some context (another top comment has some jokes from the Philogelos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838277 ), I believe it actually means student.

The jokes often reference their parents or classmates.

It made the joke above make sense to me, once I realized that.