History of the Economist Jokes Collection
October 1994 - October 1996
Preface
I was inspired to write a short history of the "Jokes about economists and
economics" while it has been on the web for two years now and the activity
around it is as if not more vivid as ever before. Readers are active in
sending comments and some new jokes though the collection has matured in the
sense that the stream of new jokes is limited. I sometimes attend seminars
where people quote the jokes and read newspaper articles that have lighter
side in the form of economist jokes.
How did it all happen?
People often ask me why I started collecting economist jokes and decided
to put the collection on the web. I didn't have a good answer and I had to
think it all over again.
I had seen many other humor collections, some professional like lawyers,
set on the WWW-pages or posted to the news-groups. There was no collection
of jokes about my own profession. I also had the impression
that many people thought that economists are dry and boring wanna-be-scientists
who hide their message into terrible jargon. What would have been a more
natural ground for trying to find the lighter side of the discipline and
show it to the people. A new media I was excited in - WWW - gave the final
punch for the launching of the ever growing venture. I also happened to
have few jokes and as a new-comer in the profession I wanted to find more.
My employer Etla gave me free hands and there was nothing to stop me. Maybe
it was also partially a search for a different attitude - economists
as well as other people have to be able to laugh at themselves.
What do we have today?
I began with four jokes in October 1994. I had been exposed to the WWW only
for few months though the rest of the Internet had been familiar for few
years. Today I have a collection of some 140 (I'm never sure as I'm too
lazy to count those) jokes and stories. Only few have my imprint on them.
I've received many more but
rejected those from the collection on several grounds. I don't take
personal, too contemporary, too general suitable for any profession,
too dirty or otherwise unsuitable jokes on my page. Dryness or jargon has
never stopped me if the story is otherwise acceptable for a joke. I'm the
only editor and someone might challenge my view. In fact, it has happened
that I've been requested to change few jokes, to add the inventors
of a joke (without me being able to really verify the fact but I try
to trust people) and to remove few jokes on the grounds that they
offended someone's religious beliefs. I have altered few jokes but
the collection has been a growing thing without any face lift-ups.
I try to take different values into account but I also believe that a joke
once taken in has its place within the collection and people who might get
offended should not read it. That is why I
have had the disclaimer all the way from the beginning. The collection
has also been rated "reasonably tasteful" and family friendly.
The
layout of the page has remained the same for nearly two years and
today is also has the same basic structure as in October 1994. I
have only added some comments and graphics with few extra HTML-features.
The crowding and slowness of the web made me to add a text only version.
I think the collection is still inadequate what comes to specific
fields of economics and different theories. Yet I can be satisfied with
the extent as the competition is poor despite of few other attempts to
put up economist humor collections. Hopefully people will
invent new stories and keep posting those to me. Thank you for all the
contributors, commentators and readers!
What has been the dissemination and impact of the collection?
After two years of existence the collection has been
visited on the web
by some 135.000 people, economists and non-economists. No one knows how
many printed versions have been made to amuse the people on their
coffee breaks and meetings.
The start was slow, few people (being mostly my friends) per week read the
collection. It gained more readers after I advertised it in few news-groups,
signed up in Lycos and Yahoo, and asked to add it into few collections
of resources for economists. The big hit came in May 1995 when the
Business Week interviewed me and made a nice story out of it. Then
I had nearly 3000 readers per week which was a lot for a small niche.
The bandwagon continued and Fortune, Globe and Mail, CHEER and some
other papers wrote about it small articles attracting new readers. During the Fall 1995 NY Times and the SF Chronicle wrote articles. At home the Finnish
audience and news stayed rather calm till Playboy magazine made a story,
without me knowing about it. This was in January 1996 and the Finnish press
made few stories out of it. It seemed that Finnish journalists don't
a) read b) value highly c) think that their readers like papers like Business
Week and Fortune - Playboy is much better known and valued it seemed. I
got my name and face into some newspapers, TV and a professional magazine. This
was also fuelled by the fact that I had published a research report. There
was some synergy between the dissemination of my jokes and research! At
some points I wondered if it was a good thing to be known as the "funny
economists" as I don't consider myself as such a humorous guy. Afterthought
was that economists and others must have sense of humor that would not
make the fame a big burden. It would be vain to deny that the collection has
made the two years different for me even if it has been a non-income
enterprise.
I know that the collection had been useful for many people preparing
speeches and even for educating economics students. I can only be
satisfied with the results. The collection has had mostly good
publicity. I would also claim that it has lightened and improved both the
public and the inner image of economists in its own modest way. At least
that is what I would like to think.
I keep getting email on the collection and it's nice to open the mail
in the morning and find nice comments on the jokes. Compared to the time
it takes to update the page the fun and benefit is enormous.
The collection has received also some rewards within the Internet
community. Other web users have made tens if not hundreds links to the
page and there are also few copies of older versions of the collection
on the web. Some of these have my acceptance and some not. According to
lawyer friends I have a sort of a copyright to the whole collection but
no one can have copyrights to single jokes which are common property.
While the intention was to disseminate the jokes I haven't tried to
stop people using the collection freely. The page has also
been rated by several organizations and given some awards.
What next?
My intention is to keep the project of collecting more jokes going on. A
new idea is to try to collect also more stories and legends around
economics, but that seems to be too big project to be undertaken
as a part-time hobby. Publishing a paper version of some of the jokes and a
deeper analysis is one idea which I have found worth of a thought. Jokes are
an important part of professional folklore.
Note March 27, 1997: The collection adopts the title JokEc and becomes a part
of the NetEc group.
Note April 24, 1997: In memoriam. The original address at
/joke.html had to be removed due to causing too much
traffic on Etla server.
Note August 26, 1998:
JokEc has also been partly translated, usually with my permission, to
several
languages. Here are some of the better ones I've seen.
Pasi's home page
Economist Jokes
Pasi Kuoppamaki
October 24, 1996