Wikipedia:Humor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

Wikipedia has a number of humoristic pages (or pages attempting to be humoristic), generally found in Category:Wikipedia humor. There has been a proliferation of such pages, and they vary wildly in terms of actual funniness. The below are a number of suggestions on what is or is not funny, taken from Uncyclopedia.

• If you spent ten seconds writing it, perhaps ten people will like it. If you spent ten minutes, you might have hundreds. Even though we're full of lies and bullshit, the amount of work necessary to write a funny article may be on par with Wikipedia. The quality of our articles varies, but as a parody, it doesn't mean our quality standard should drop, just that our content is different.

• Moreover, simple, unadorned lists are rarely funny. You know the type: "List of people who can't spell" or "List of stupid things." Sometimes simple lists can be useful in launching a broader idea, as in US Presidents, but trying to be funny by listing "people who Oscar Wilde hates" isn't, well, funny. Or useful. If you must make a list, don't make it a quickie; at least spend some time fleshing it out, like in Worst 100 Movies of All Time.

• Research. A good chunk of stuff on here is random, and random can be funny. But the truly great articles require a bit of research. In order to effectively parody or satirize a subject, do some research on the real thing first, and your jokes will be better and actually make sense.

• Delete, delete, delete. More writing is more funny, right? Not necessarily. There's a reason why it's possible to make a living as an editor, a person whose job is mainly to delete prose and throw manuscripts in the trash: most writing is bad. Good writers understand this, and spend as much time mercilessly hacking their work apart as they do creating it in the first place, even throwing away completed novels to start from scratch. The ability to look at your own work, ask, "does this suck?" and answer honestly is one of the major differences between the pros and amateurs. Writing is as much about destruction as creation, so spend at least as much time editing as writing. Another way to think about it: writing is like cooking, it's as much about what you leave out as what you put in. When cooking a soup, you do everything possible not to put crap into it, shouldn't you do the same when you write?

• Revise, revise, revise. Maybe you misspelled a word, perhaps you thought of a clever joke, or a Photoshopped jpg to ice that cake. To create a really polished piece of work, you have to revisit it and smooth off all the imperfections. True, some people can hammer out a perfect first draft, but most people can't. Even Shakespeare devoted time to revising and polishing his plays.