This meme courtesy of Nicky Mee

This meme courtesy of Nicky Mee

This meme courtesy of Nicky Mee

This meme courtesy of Nicky Mee

The very best in crowd-sourced Internet humor: top5list.com

The locker joke is mine; I was bullied in high school, but I was too big to be shoved in a locker and too heavy for a swirly. So it turns out sticks and stones may break your bones, but words from morons never hurt me.

There are many variations on this joke, but here is the one that appeared in this column 26 years ago: program notes written by Carey Perloff of ACT.

 “It would typically require at least five Oxford graduates to screw in a light bulb – four to determine its essence, and one to call the janitor. Assuming, of course, that you could find an Oxford grad who grasped the principles of electric illumination in the first place.”

More proof, if more is needed, that human beings write better humor than LLMs, even if the humor is simply a “pun engine” in Claude’s words. It doesn’t always know how humans pronounce words, and hence fails at this joke template. This meme comes from Nicky Mee.

This meme courtesy of Nicky Mee

Courtesy of Lorena Acosta

I have been a contributor to this humor co-op for decades. The entries are no longer numbered, but I choose to think of mine, at the top, as No.1

There was a second list, and I made that one too, albeit not at number one. The Macarena item is mine, and it is an inside joke between me and the editor of the site, Chris White. For decades (ever since they were actually a thing) I have been submitting items about either the Lambada or the Macarena. Once in a while, Chris runs up the white flag and uses one.