The Bad Joke Conundrum

The new and improved blogger provides lots of blog stats that I find rather entertaining. I always wonder who reads the stuff I unleash on the internet and it’s fun learning a little bit more about my dear readers. Here are my basic stats – this blog gets somewhere between 30 and 100 page views per day, typically averaging about 60 page views per day. While some posts receive more hits than others the spread is minimal and it appears most of the people who read this blog, read this blog. So each entry receives about the same total number of viewers. Of those viewers, somewhere between 5 and 10% leave comments and the comments are all very nice. This is a nice blog.


Now for the interesting part. This is not my first blog. Before I started this blog, I posted for a little over a year at Misadventures In Spelling. That blog was supposed to be all about dyslexia. When I ran out of things to say about dyslexia, I moved over here. I am dyslexic and the novel I currently have out on sub has a dyslexic main character. Most of the posts that I put up on my old dyslexia blog were funny, in a tongue in cheek self-deprecating way. A few months after I started blogging, one of my friends commented (in real life) that I hadn’t done a post of dyslexia jokes yet. Since all of my posts were kind of long self-incriminating dyslexia jokes, an official dyslexia jokes post seemed fitting.

So in June of 2009, I posted a list of dyslexia jokes. Except, I only know three semi-funny dyslexia jokes.

A dyslexic walked into a bra…

What do you get when you cross an agnostic, a dyslexic, and an insomniac? Someone who stays up all night wondering if there’s a dog.

And, Dyslexics of the world UNTIE.

I know, I know, even those aren’t that funny, but they’re the best dyslexia jokes I know. Still I managed to track down about a dozen other really bad dyslexia jokes and call it a blog post. Now, almost three years later that one blog post has received about 12,000 page views. As many people look at that one post on my old blog per day then look at all the posts on this blog put together. It should also be noted that nobody ever looks at any of the other posts on that old blog. Many of those old posts have had less than a dozen page views ever. But why? What is it about that one random blog post from three years ago that draws so many views?

When I do a google search for “dyslexia jokes”, my 2009 blog post isn’t even the first page to come up anymore. For a while it was the number one page, but it’s now dropped down to 3rd. But I guess third is still pretty good because lots of people are reading it, and after they read my three year old post of bad jokes, they leave comments.

I’ve never deleted any comments left on any of my blog posts, cause I’m anti-censorship. Still I find the comments my dyslexia jokes post get even more baffling than the high readership. At least 90% of the comments that post receives are from anonymous commenters and they contain lots of f-bombs telling me how evil I am for making fun of dyslexic people, who are very intelligent and should not be made fun of thank you very much. If these commenters read the rest of that blog, or even the about me sidebar they would know that I am dyslexic and was only making fun of myself. But as I said before, nobody is reading the rest of that blog they stop at the post full of bad jokes.

My assumption is that dyslexics with chips on their shoulders want to lash out at someone for making them feel bad about themselves, so they google dyslexia jokes and then swear at the people who dare to tell them. They never bother to look and see who’s telling these jokes, or even to worry about the fact that the jokes are seriously lame. Maybe they can’t read. Whatever the reason, I find the whole thing very funny. It’s a lot more entertaining than the bad jokes, at least for me.