Every April Fool’s day I am stunned that — with 50,000 standup comedian’s out of work* — that technoweenies, geeks and propellerheads are making free jokes.

If they were good jokes I wouldn’t mind. If the humor was leveraging the collective consciousness or there was an open source joke ecosystem giving us true hilarity, I wouldn’t mind. Perhaps a thousand techies working on a joke might actually get me to collapse in laughter reading/hearing it instead of wondering why my mouth rarely cracks even the hint of a smile.

Imagine a standup comedian at the Laugh Factory telling any of these:

• Why did the Comp. Engineer get X-mas and Halloween mixed up? A: Because Oct(31) == Dec(25)!’

• Q: How many software engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
  A: Sorry, that’s a hardware question.

• A mechanical, a hydraulic engineer, and a software engineer were driving along a narrow mountain road, when the brakes fail, the car goes out of control, and crashes into a tree. They are a hundred miles from home, and it’s starting to rain.

  
  

  The mechanical engineer examines the brake shoes and see that they have multiple stress fractures, and need to be replaced. The hydraulic engineer examines the brake lines and sees that the pressure is way below minimum, and that they need more brake fluid. The software engineer looks at the the other two engineers and says:

  “It’s just a crash. Help me push me push it back out to the road and we’ll try it again.”

Oh geez…oh man….those are just hilarious and — hang on a second — I’m OK now…I just had to wipe up the milk that snorted out of my nose. (Disclaimer: I actually didn’t find them amusing but wrote that sentence for dramatic effect).

But something troubles me about the functionally-humor-challenged people residing in geekdom…

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