About Joke Almanac

Joke Almanac collects classic jokes from American joke books published between 1900 and 1928. These books are in the public domain in the United States, and we read them through the free editions of Project Gutenberg.

How the jokes are picked

• Every joke is read and picked individually. Most of what those books printed did not make the cut.
• A joke only goes on a topic page when the topic is what the joke is about, not a passing mention.
• We leave out jokes built on ethnic or racial stereotypes, dialect spelling, cruelty and anything that only made sense a hundred years ago.
• We update spelling and punctuation (so "to-day" becomes "today"), but the joke itself stays as it was printed.
• Each joke shows the book it came from, with a link to the full text.

The books

• Toaster's Handbook: Jokes, Stories, and Quotations (1916)
• More Toasts: Jokes, Stories and Quotations (1922)
• Jokes For All Occasions (1922)
• The New Pun Book (1906)
• The Handbook of Conundrums (1915)
• How to Solve Conundrums (1900)
• Funny Stories Told by the Soldiers (1919)
• Conundrums, Riddles and Puzzles (1903)
• Wehman Bros.' Vaudeville Jokes No. 1 (1907)

901 jokes so far. More topics are on the way.