Sure enough, there were tons of humorous home pages, funny quotations, spoofs, puns and vignettes. This stuff has its moments, but it is mostly only funny to the initiated few. Which gets us to the very heart of the computer humor predicament. Technology, unlike other topics, is not a universally shared thing. If a big fat banker slips on a banana peel, everyone, except a small but robust handful in the financial community, will bust out laughing.
Techies making fun of dumb innocent users is funny in a bitter sort of way to the techies.
It draws on all their pain and unappreciated expertise. But it leaves the rest of us cold. Making fun of some doc-writing devil in Rangoon experimenting with the English language lets us express our frustration with bad documentation. But it isn't especially funny, and an unattractive chauvinism seeps through. It seems to me that good humor engages pain, and the best humor reflects back on oneself.