Monday, February 25, 2013

Introduction to Henry Cate's Life Humor collection

When I was a couple years out of college a friend emailed me a collection of jokes he had come across.  I saved the jokes and started adding to the collection.  Being young and single I had lots of free time.  And being a bit compulsive I started collecting more jokes. 

As the collection grew I started mailing snippets of it to friends, people I worked with and eventually even to people I didn't know. When the first couple batches went out the subject of the email was something like "Jokes 1.1" or "Humor 1.1." One friend was concerned that if his manager saw the subject line he would get into a bit of trouble, so I changed the subject of the emails to "Life 1.1" and this become the Henry Cate Life (Humor) collection.

At one point I was sifting through almost fifty different sources of humor.  These included rec.humor and other news groups.  Since rec.humor received sometimes hundreds of posts a day I enlisted others to help with the sifting process.  I was also on a couple dozen mailing humor mailing lists.  And at times I even plowed through other people's collections.   

Over a period of almost ten years I gathered about 50,000 clean jokes, thoughts, puns, sayings and so on. 

I've decided to post some of the collection to our blog.  I hope you enjoy the humor.

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