Firstly,
archive.org is an absolute treasure. The modern day Library of Alexandria, except it's filled with absolute garbage
*. Because of its obsessive copying I was actually able to trawl back and find the website at the relevant point in time. And to learn that I actually didn't know what I was talking about.
Humor is one of natures greatest achievements. Somehow our squishy lizard brains got wired in a way that being surprised can sometimes release dopamine and sometimes cortisol/adrenaline. Now I'm not an expert but Jerry Suls probably is. See also:
The psychology of humor; theoretical perspectives and empirical issues His model of humor is the incongruity model: humor exists when the mental model you have for something is different than the actual occurrence. ie when you are surprised. Surrealist humor in particular relies on this surprise. The contrarian nature or total aversion to the truth lets people get away with some very uh 'interesting' jokes. But it also leads to this absolute gem. Before I show you how it actually went, I'm going to tell my version of it.
Okay, so there is this website called pigeons and planes and while it now has headlines like "André 3000 Releases Statement on Drake Leaking Kanye West Collab “Life of the Party”", it used to be a great music blog for soon-to-be-hit tracks and featured incredible mixes. This was all great, but to me the best part of the site was the navigation boasting Home, About, Contact, Contests, Games, Mixes, Shirts, and Subscribe. They mostly do what they said on the box, except Games. When you clicked on it, you were taken to a page that said only "We don't play no games here". The setup, the double meaning of games, the unexpectedness of a joke in web design all solidified it as one of the most humorous things I'll ever see.
So I went back in the wayback machine and
found it. Turns out the menu item was actually Jokes and the page said "Just kidding – we don’t do jokes here.", which is also very, very good. But I like the way I remember it more.
Side note: if anyone still has a copy of Pigeon and Planes' "Awake In The Night" mixtape that they could send to
bones.bones@skeleton.club, I would be eternally grateful, that mix was amazing.