30 Very Appropriate Jokes, As Shared On This "Clean Jokes" Online Group

When asked if there’s always an offensive element to telling jokes, Sophie Scott, the British neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at University College London, told Bored Panda that this is indeed the case. Her research investigates the cognitive neuroscience of voices, speech and laughter, particularly speech perception, speech production, vocal emotions, and human communication.

“There are no jokes that are guaranteed to be funny for everyone. And there may be a reference in there that someone finds personally offensive, like the basis for this very old Onion,” the professor explained.

Moreover, Scott argues that “it’s possible that any joke could offend someone, and that the perceived offence is compounded by the invitation to laugh that a joke implies.”

“There is also evidence that people vary in the extent to which they think they are being personally ridiculed when they hear laughter, so it’s possible that they would be more likely to be upset by a joke,” she explained.

To find out more about the Clean Jokes community, we reached out to its moderator Ccm596 who shared a couple of insights about it. “I had been wanting to start a good subreddit (I think I had already made a couple at this point, very niche stuff, /r/Kennedy, /r/matchboxtwenty, one for my hometown of only 15k people) and nothing really came to me,” the moderator recounted the origins of the subreddit.

Ccm596 noticed that “there was a sizable community in /r/jokes who had grown tired of the sub having so many ‘dirty’ jokes. I personally didn't, and don't, have an issue with dirty jokes, but I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to cleaner humor,” they said in an interview.

So the idea of Clean Jokes, according to the moderator, is a place for redditors to have somewhere to go for jokes where they know that anything they click on will be appropriate for them to tell their children, or their coworkers. “Jokes that are guaranteed to be 'safe,' I guess. Where people of any community can have a laugh,” they added. To put it simply, the moderator says, “a clean joke” is the kind of joke that doesn’t deal in any "mature" concepts or situations.

However, when it comes to Ccm596, “I have no qualms about dark, offensive humor. Many of my favorite jokes, to hear and tell, would not slide on the subreddit.” According to the moderator, “it is important for comedy to push the boundaries of what's 'acceptable' (so long as it isn't comedy that punches down), but at the same time, there's also definitely a place for 'safe' comedy, and it doesn't inherently have to be dark or offensive in order to push those boundaries.”

When asked about how the Clean Jokes community is doing, Ccm596 said that they are honestly very happy with the state of the subreddit, “and I think our current trajectory is a good one,” the mod added.

“That said, I've always wanted to take a more active role in the moderation of the subreddit. At the moment, the MO is basically 'let AutoMod do its thing, handle things as we need to, hands off otherwise' and I think it works out fine, but a more active mod [team] certainly wouldn't hurt,” Ccm596 told us.

Moreover, “we had a bit of an incident in early days, which has me a little apprehensive about taking on new members to the team,” the mod recounted. “But like I said, I'm pretty hands-off myself too, so the answer isn't even necessarily in expanding. We used to have events once in awhile, 'joke of the month' type things, but I couldn't really think of anything fun to do with it, so I kind of dropped it after a while.”