Most intentionally funny Web sites are just a joke

But when you go looking for humor — material intended to be funny on a site dedicated to same — it gets tricky.

In trolling the Internet for an honest laugh, one is forced to confront the fact that, after we get past chuckling at the latest 87 viral videos, maybe this medium is better at giving us good prices on printers.

I am on Office Pirates, a 6-month-old humor site that wants to be the place men in their 20s and 30s go when their boss is not looking.

I am looking at the fourth in the site's series of photographs of attractive women snapped on the streets of New York City. I hope my boss does not see me doing this.

These women are nice to look at, even furtively, no doubt about that.

But the captions accompanying these photographs, written by Office Pirates staffers and meant to give the pictures a purpose beyond ogling, are, really, not funny.

Also not funny, despite its "top rated" status: the video in which every woman in a guy's office is wearing only slinky lingerie — then the dream ends and hairy men in brassieres stand in front of him.

This video has been an Office Pirates (officepirates.com) favorite since February, which is when the site launched, a Web-only "magazine" from the Time Inc. empire that one can also call, if one wants to be negative, the AOL empire.

It's headed by a former Maxim editor, but it somehow lacks even the charmingly bone-headed joie de vivre of lad mags in their heyday, before the likes of Esquire and Playboy tried to be lad mags, too, and the whole beer-babes-and-jokes-on-glossy-pages genre imploded from, ironically, overexposure.

There are only so many dollars in the Axe Body Spray advertising budget, it seems.

Office Pirates is a lad magazine in a necktie, designed to amuse people who are procrastinating while, perhaps, wearing neckties themselves. This is the definition of a low threshold.

It's not that everything there is horrible, mind you. It's just that you spend a lot of time looking for one thing that's as funny as half a dozen things that you can find on the first page of the Onion.

(The Onion, in case you don't know, was a ratty little humor newspaper you used to find around Madison, Wis., and be pleasantly surprised by. It went national and became big on the Net (theonion.com), and the writers moved to New York, but it's still funny.)

I've moved on from Office Pirates to a newer site, Daily Comedy (dailycomedy.com). This one is populated by a bunch of real comedians, which you can tell because of the determinedly wacky poses they adopt for their photographs.

Most of the rest of it reads like a blog of potential Jay Leno monologue jokes — one-liners off the news, put up by the comics who think of them. Some, such as this paraphrased sample, aren't bad: Alcohol has apologized for forcing Mel Gibson to make anti-Semitic comments and is checking into rehab.

Call this one a work in progress, but give it credit for frequent updates, less raunch than, say, Heavy.com, and an uncluttered design.

Also relatively new is JokeBox, the attempt at a joke-based social network from JibJab, the people behind the "This Land" presidential election spoof (www.jibjab.com/jokebox).

In the text areas, it's pretty folksy, but some of the jokes could come in handy if you've got a Rotary Club speech to give or a potential father-in-law to impress.

The video region is a fine distillation of what's attracting attention of humor lovers from sites such as the video-sharing playground YouTube.

I still prefer the original work of JibJab, and of the other people trying to write fresh humor out there. But the JokeBox seems to do well its job of displaying what, comedically, Middle America is sharing.

Here, beyond the Onion, are some other sites that have proved reliable for humor:

● Comedy Central (comedy central.com), where you can find "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" clips, plus video of stand-up comics.

● McSweeney's Internet Tendency (mcsweeneys.net), where the dedication to clever writing means things can get a little arch, but, then again, good arch is very good, indeed.

● About.com's humor area (humor.about.com), which collects a whole lot of links, and some of them do, in fact, lead to amusement.

● Modern Humorist (modern humorist.com), existing only as an archival shell of a humor site, but a pretty good schedule, a reliable genre, executed well.

And here's what has been reliably unfunny:

● The video titled "you've gotta see this" e-mailed to you by your college buddy.