Orgitron DMT Labs · the vault

Joke.

Forty-one categories: two hundred short jokes and 410 long-form stories, ten in every one. 1,142 were written by hand for this site; the rest are built live by an engine of 24 comic forms and thrown away again by a meter that scores the shape of a joke. Twenty of the categories are languages, written in their own comic traditions and readable in their own languages. One turn each, the punch as late as it will go, and a fresh one printed here on every load.

Any category · random every load

41categories

8,610jokes

1,142written by hand

7,468built by the engine

410long-form stories

Orgitron DMT Labs — Joke: the joker plate
Orgitron DMT Labs · Joker

The vault

Forty-one ways in.

Two hundred short jokes and ten long ones in each. Every card says how many were written by hand; the balance is the engine’s, and every row in the sheet says which it is and what form built it. The long ones sit under their own rule at the foot of each category and are all hand-written — a story is a build, and a build is the one thing twenty-four sentence patterns cannot fake. The last twenty categories are languages, written in their own comic traditions and readable in their own languages: open one and use the toggle in the header.

The lab

The engine, the meter and the dial.

The vault is not a list. It is 1,142 written jokes plus an engine that fills every category to two hundred out of 24 comic forms and per-category material, and a meter that throws away most of what the engine writes — and that says so when it cannot read something. Here is all three, running.

The regulator

Showing 8,569 of 8,610.

One dial, three decisions: which forms the engine may use, how hard it pushes them, and what the meter will accept. It also hides the flatter half of the written jokes, because it would be strange for a setting called SHARP to sharpen only the machine’s half of the vault.

Build me one

Score your own

What this measures, plainly. Not whether something is funny — nothing measures that. It measures the six things a comedian names when a joke is not working: the punch arrives too early, it takes too long to get there, it is about “people” instead of about a man named Derek, it is three jokes in a coat, the last word was already in the first line, or you have heard it. All six are countable. Failing them reliably means not funny; passing them guarantees nothing.

Find a joke

Any word in any of them.

Matched against the joke itself, its category and what that category is about — so “server” finds the IT jokes and “dog” finds the ones with a dog in them.

Send one in

If yours is better, say so.

This opens your own mail client with the joke already written into it, addressed to labs@labs.llc. Nothing is stored here and nothing is sent without you pressing send — there is no database behind this page and a form that pretended otherwise would be lying.

The only address on this site is labs@labs.llc.

About

Written, not collected.

01

Every one is new

The set before this was the stock internet twelve — the eggs cracking each other up, the anti-gravity book, the impasta. All 252 were replaced with jokes written for this site: specific nouns, one turn, and nothing a reader has already been sent four times.

02

They are printed, not pasted

A punchline that arrives all at once has no timing, so the text types and the last few characters land after a beat. Any tap finishes the line instantly, and a reader who has asked for less motion gets the whole joke at once rather than a faster machine.

03

Two editions, one vault

Paper here, and the same 252 on the deep ground one tap away on the pill. The category colours are the only thing that changes between them: each carries a print value and a screen value, both measured against the ground they sit on.