A Trial On Internet Joke

The Internet, for its surprisingly rapid growth of coverage, unequaled fast communicating speed and enormously abundant information provision, has become a brand new type of mass-media. It provides its users not only a wide range of information and but also a space for mass revel. In this space, multitudes of internet jokes are created and spread, which opens a new world for the international folk literature. Thus the research and study on this present situation of internet joke will supplement the present study of Chinese jokes and offers a new perspective to study the internet culture.This thesis makes an analysis of internet jokes at three respects. Part One defines internet joke in both broad sense and narrow sense, attempting to explain the latter: jokes that are created and spread in the cyber society by means of the internet. Internet joke shares many characteristics in common with their folk counterparts, such orality, collectiveness, heritability and variability. Nevertheless, due to the facts that it is mainly spread on the internet and that internet users cannot be equated with the whole people, internet joke should be differentiated from folk jokes.Part Two explores and analyzes the existing internet jokes in the cyberspace. The equality, anonymousness and freedom of the cyberspace grant its dweller—internet joke—corresponding characteristics, In a open space, the primary purpose of joke creation and spreading is to share and communicate and internet joke, for its orality and writtenness, possesses both temporary ecstasy and lasting reflection and accumulation. What is more, the cyber space offers an outlet of sexual repression. Those sex-related internet jokes, on one hand, reveal the mass negation of authority and rebellion against traditional morality (mainly about sex opinion and customs); but on the other hand, they also broaden and strengthen their connatural negative influence and effect on the society.Part Three gives a basic conceptual and content analysis on internet kuso and tries to list causes for its prevailing. Internet kuso inherits the amusing and satiric characteristics of jokes and by applying all available multimedia forms extends and develops them on the internet, it is another form of internet joke.