yoonholee/humor-greats-public-domain

Humor Greats

Short humorous texts -- jokes, aphorisms, quips, anecdotes -- extracted from public-domain humor collections on Project Gutenberg. All source texts are pre-1929 and public domain in the US. Intended as a reference set of "gold" humorous writing for evaluation, few-shot prompting, and stylistic study.

Contents

19,354 entries across 8 books, spanning two clear registers:

Concentrated wit (authored):

Period joke / anecdote collections:

The first register -- Bierce, Wilde, Twain -- is the densest "gold." The second contains classic Victorian and Edwardian jest-book material of mixed quality; use it as a reference for period humor style rather than as peak wit.

Schema

Source books

• —Ambrose Bierce, *The Devil's Dictionary* (1911)
• —Oscar Wilde, *Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man* (1893)
• —Mark Twain, *Quotations from the Project Gutenberg Editions of the Works of Mark Twain*
• —Mark Lemon, *The Jest Book: The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings* (1864)
• —Herbert L. Fanning, *Toaster's Handbook: Jokes, Stories, and Quotations* (1914)
• —Paul Mosher, *More Toasts* (1922)
• —Anonymous, *Jokes For All Occasions* (1923)
• —Various, *The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun* (1907)

Parsing notes

Each book was split on blank-line paragraph boundaries after stripping Gutenberg front/back matter and skipping the first 4% of body (preface / table of contents). A paragraph was kept as an entry if: it was 1-15 lines, 30-1800 chars, started with an uppercase letter / quotation mark / digit, and did not look like a ToC or all-caps section header. Bierce entries additionally required the WORD, pos. dictionary-format header to filter out his prose interludes. Twain's file had a 12% ToC which was skipped explicitly.

Expect some noise:

• —The Jest Book and Toaster's Handbook style conventions (numbered sections with titles like "VIII.--BEARDING A BARBER") mean titles sometimes appear mixed into the body text.
• —Italic markers from the Gutenberg plaintext (_word_) are preserved as-is.
• —Mark Twain's quotations are formatted as single-line fragments in the source; the paragraph-based parser undercounts them.

Intended uses

• —Reference / few-shot prompting for humor generation.
• —Stylistic evaluation: "does this text read like Bierce? Wilde? a period joke book?"
• —Pairwise preference collection: "which of these two aphorisms is funnier / more in-voice?"
• —Training data for humor classifiers (period vs. modern, concentrated wit vs. punchline).

License

CC0 1.0 Universal -- all source texts are public domain. Parsing and curation are also released under CC0.

Citation

Source texts courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Curation by Yoonho Lee.