This week’s feature member is presently the third funniest person on Comic Wonder. At least according to our Sense of Humor Index, a rating system that rewards those who tell funny jokes, find funny jokes before everyone else, are positive members in the community, and win stuff.

Yes, Skez63 is truly funny. He has the hardware to prove it to. Hailing from Indiana, his midwestern drawl is a trademark on his winning performances. He’s pulled in Comic Wonder of the Week nods four times:

• “Breakfast at the White House” on July 21st, 2008
• “Foreskins and matzo balls” on July 7th, 2008
• “No Monkeys Allowed” on May 19th, 2008
• “Gator Shoes” on Cinco de Mayo, 2008

His most famous joke is “No Monkeys Allowed” which received Comic Wonder of the Month honors for May, and is in the running for the Comic Wonder of the Year announced in December.

Skez is one of our best community members, and it shows. He has started this trend of putting “(JL)” in his joke titles for any jokes he rescues from Joke Limbo. By our count, his is our most prolific missionary. Both Skez and Comic Wonder invite you to start tagging your jokes with (JL) in both your joke title or your joke tags.

So thank you Skez for giving us some of our best jokes (and best voices of drunk people and blondes!), and being our finest missionary saving jokes from Joke Limbo Comic Wonder has ever had!

Twice a month, Comic Wonder will bring you some Featured Members commentary. Our goal for the feature is to give some inside information on those members who deserve to be broadcast to the community.

This week’s featured member gives us two guys from our neighbors to the north, Canada. Canucklehead and FOGGY are two members who have been active on Comic Wonder since the start. Well, we’re pretty sure Canucklehead is from Canada with a name like that! FOGGY has some fantastic jokes with Canadians as the punchlines, so it was natural to assume we could include him in this award.

We chose these two guys because we wanted to give a big thanks to our very large Canadian contingent on the site. Who would have thought Canadians would love jokes as much as Comic Wonder does? Well, we’re glad to have them and some of our best joke tellers hail from “up nort.”

These guys are both winners. Canucklehead most recently won Comic Wonder of the Week on February 28th, 2008, with the joke “Oh Canada!” FOGGY’s follow up five weeks later was “FIRST DATES”.

Canucklehead has exactly 50 jokes on Comic Wonder, and although “Oh Canada!” is hilarious, our favorite is “Oh No Ewe Didn’t!” — Short, simple, and hilarious.

FOGGY has some classics in his arsenal, but our favorite is “PRESIDENTS AND PRIME MINISTERS”, which includes his trademark laugh at the end. And what great timing with the American election coming up!

So we’d like to give a big ol’ American salute to our Canadian friends, and any other Comic Wonder member who greets us from above the northern border. If you happen to be a Comic Wonder member and from Canada, please leave a comment with your username so we, and everyone else, can know and thank you!

Thanks again, Team Canada!

Hello Comic Wonders!

Our second installment of our bi-weekly feature gives us one of the most positive members within the community. This is of course Wayne Edwards!

Wayne has come over to Comic Wonder from his blog The Family Poet, where he writes humor-based poetry for families and children. In a world where the concept of “joke” is often instantly related with dirty, derogatory, or debauchery connotations, we are happy to have members like Wayne to help balance things out. In the future, Comic Wonder is hoping to provide some family-rated sections of the site where only the best content for children will be available. If you’re a fan of the traditional joke, this may not the section for you, but it is a goal of Comic Wonders’ nonetheless, and Wayne’s jokes will be front and center for families to hear.

Wayne has not won any Comic Wonder of the Week awards, but here are some of our favorite humor poems he has told:

• “Idiot Store”
•  “Grandpa’s Secret for Long Life”
• “Highway Sign”

Do you have a favorite humor poem by Wayne? You can check out all his work here. He has 86 jokes to choose from, so if you find one you like that we didn’t mention, please feel free to share!

A big heart-felt thanks goes out to Wayne for all his creativity and positive energy on Comic Wonder, and we’re proud to feature him as this week’s Featured Member.

You can view all our featured member stories by bookmarking this page. Check back every other Friday when we release the next installment. Something tells me next week we’ll be going north of the border…

While many college students are currently in the throws of March Madness (click here to see a funny video of two guys filling out their brackets for this year) and are joined together screaming at the TV, other times they actually are hard at work studying and *occasionally* taking a break and going online. Things have definitely changed since I started college eleven years ago, I don’t remember any sites like this, which - is probably a good thing. Actually - I didn’t even have a computer, so there you go.

Here are the major sites I found that college kids are active on - all have jokes, videos, pictures and a lot of college followers.  After reading the comments and videos - let’s hope some of these kids never want to become president!

• College Humor
• College Clown
• College Slackers
• Points in Case

If you’re in college and not active on these you better get going, it seems to be the thing to do.  Oh…to be in college again and get to lay around your dorm room, mess around online, drink cheap beer and eat crappy food. What a life!

Did you know that three out of every five men still tell the same jokes they mastered as a kid, yet 70% believe they have “serious comedic chops?”  Men’s Health published a reader survey this month on joke-telling, which answers such questions as: Where men get their material (Good ol’ dad and the Internet); Who is the funnier gender (I’ll keep you guessing there); And who their comic timing most resembles (Did you know that John Stewart mimics are running amok?).

If these statics are any indicator, the sad truth about joke-telling is that we tend to get stuck. When you stop to consider that 20% admit to getting in fights over jokes they have told and 50% rely on jokes about other people’s mothers, its pretty clear that our humor tends to stagnate as we age.

So, who cares if you have juvenile sense of humor?  Well, more people than you may think. When you consider that “98% of CEOs prefer candidates with a sense of humor” and 72% of women “will date a man who’s funny regardless of his looks,” this lack of evolution could cost your career and lady luck.

Moral of the story, it’s time to learn some new material boys!

This month, Comic Wonder is launching a new feature: Joke Limbo.  If you have been eager to tell a joke on the site but don’t know any decent material, this new section will cure what ails you. You can flip through jokes by category (e.g., “golf jokes“) or just browse at random.  When you’ve found one that makes you laugh out loud, click the “Tell This Joke” and off you go!

When it comes to making someone laugh, there is no substitute for practice.  May as well start practicing on strangers before bringing your new material back to the family table.  If you’re gonna bomb, do it here!

So you’ve finally made it into work–albeit dreadfully late–but at least you’re there. And as a bonus (the only kind you’ll be getting this year, mind you), your boss was in a meeting and didn’t notice your tardiness. Now for the real challenge, what are you going to do for the next eight hours? Maybe ask yourself the standard series of questions: why did I go out last night, I want to crawl under my desk and die? When is my coworker going to stop talking? Why is the clock moving so slowly today when the time during the weekend never moves this slow? Then, maybe consider what your co-worker is thinking - surely, it’s something along the lines of “how do I look productive while I’m searching the web?”

Being a team member at Comic Wonder, I no longer have these thoughts.  But hey, if it happens to you, know that you are not alone.  Check out these great websites that were dedicated to your work woes:

• My Corporate Hell - where users share horror stories about their boss, the company waste, stupid people they have worked with and the worst mission statements ever.
• Office Olympics - an entertainment website offering office humor videos mainly performed by their cast.  Users can submit their own office olympic videos, as well.
• Office Misery - their site says they are dedicated to providing office employees with quality dysfunctional work ethics and a low moral working environment.
• Kewlbox - a website full of games you can play at the office.  I recommend Char-iots of Flyers - a game where you select your player and chair and have to work through an office opstical course.
• Office Humor Blog - a blog featuring office pranks, daily jokes, news, downloads, and other office humor.

These are really fun sites & sure to make your work day move faster (if you can hide your monitor)!!

When telling a joke, stunned silence isn’t the response most of us hope to inspire.  To help improve your odds of laughter, you may want to try a couple tricks of the trade.

1.       Know your material.  Practice telling your joke several times before telling it publicly.  Try it out in the shower, car, mirror while dancing.

2.       Is the joke right for your audience?  Maybe your college buddies think your joke’s a hoot, but will your mom?

3.       Be inventive!  The best jokes are rich in interesting detail.  If you mention a car in your joke, try giving it some personality.  Is it a burnt orange Dodge Durango, a lime green Pinto? The more specific you are, the more you invite your audience in.

4.       Original jokes are the funniest.  Nothing worse than mimicking someone else’s warmed-over routine.

5.       The funniest jokes have a strong, unexpected conclusion.  If your audience can see where you are going, you are more likely to elicit a groan than a laugh.

6.       Keep it short and sweet.  Nothing funny about a five minute joke, unless you are a real pro.  There are few people who can keep an audience’s wrapped attention for more than a minute these days.  Statistically speaking, the odds are against you.

7.       Watch out for detours in your joke.  If you get sidetracked, so will your audience.  Oh look, a chicken!

8.       Don’t use accents unless you have mastered them.  Nothing’s worse than an Irish brogue that sounds more like an Indian accent.  Also, be careful.  In certain contexts, an accent in the wrong joke can be highly offensive.  Just ask Rosie O’Donnell how well her “Chinese” went over on The View.

9.       If you don’t fully understand the joke, don’t repeat it.  It’s likely to be far more offensive than you think.  I am still living down a joke I told my father when I was 12…

10.   The best jokes have a cadence to them, a rhythm.  Try to keep your tone confident, expressive, but most importantly comfortable.  Nervous giggles sprinkled about or too many “ums” and “likes” are instant mojo killers.

11.   Is your material offensive?  If so, to whom?  It doesn’t take much talent to make people giggle when you drop the f-bomb.  Unless you are Eddie Murphy or George Carlin, it’s probably just nervous laughter.

12.   Listen to your favorite joke-tellers carefully.  What makes their jokes so funny?  Ask them where they get their material.

13.   Watch stand-up comedy for inspiration not imitation.  There is a big difference between stand-up and joke telling.  Professional comedians practice an art that requires years of intensive training to master.  I would liken the difference between joke-telling and stand-up to the average blog post vs. Ulysses. If people aren’t already telling you that you are the James Joyce of comedy, you may just want to keep it short and sweet.