shewentofherownaccord.com - Roo Reynolds and Nick O'Leary

- My wife's gone to the Caribbean
- Jamaica?
- No, she went of her own accord

There are certain classic joke formats, like Doctor Doctor jokes and Knock Knock jokes, (if we're ever sharing a drink, ask me about the great line of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary jokes) that just work. Anyone with a sense of humour can join in. One of the under-rated forms of the genre is the Jamaica joke, as seen above. A set-up line, a pun on a place-name, a punch-line. Simple and classic, but when done well, very funny indeed. I first came across them in the song What Did Delaware, a staple of Family Favourites and Junior Choice when I was a kid. I'd never heard of half the States that were mentioned until I heard the song, so they're not just witty but educational.

Roo Reynolds and Nick O'Leary are developers for IBM. Over the past few years, they have collected a pile of these, and finally it got to the point they needed to collate them and put them out on the web. So we get to the point where Social Software meets joke-telling, and frankly I think the world is a better place for it. Their site is shewentofherownaccord.com, and they were good enough to tell me about it at Open Tech 2008:

shewentofherownaccord.com - Roo Reynolds and Nick O'Leary from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

My own personal contributions are Swansea, Nottingham, Bakewell (8 votes!), among several others.

One of the things we discussed off-camera was who actually gets these jokes. Roo mentioned he had a deaf friend who didn't get them, because the phonetic component of a name wasn't something they engaged with. I wondered whether people for whom English is a second language, (I've got colleagues who would say that includes me, but it doesn't, honest) would feel able to join in? Puns are ages old - Shakespeare was a great punner, he'd have liked shewentofherownaccord - but they aren't universal. So, please feel free to comment whether you like these jokes, whether you get them but don't find them funny, or whether they are just lost on you. And if you get them and like them, feel free to make up your own and contribute them to shewentofherowaccord.com.