/entertainment/

Sites for sore sides

Tired of bad jokes in e-mail? Comedy pros are all over the Web

By Eric Griffith

You can always find reviews of the latest cool gadgets, movies and books online. But where do you turn for reviews of things you take for granted such as ... the human hand? Or pain? Or saliva?

You can find them at TimmyBigHands, a site by the team behind the classic cable TV show "Mystery Science Theater 3000," where a human and his robot pals heckled old sci-fi films. As the name of the Web site implies, TimmyBigHands isn't to be taken seriously. Or maybe it doesn't imply anything. According to Mike Nelson, one of the site's creators and the former human star of MST3K, "It means a bunch of guys were frustrated coming up with a name, and that one made us laugh."

TimmyBigHands is a comedic outlet for Nelson (who authored a book on bad films called "Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese") and fellow creators, who parody everything from maple syrup advertisements to serial novels to Flash-based games and comics. If TimmyBigHands' Monty Python-esque brand of wacky humor isn't for you, try the satirical Modern Humorist, the more mainstream Comedy Central and the classic mock news of our Wackcess Award winner The Onion. For surfers with broadband, there are the daily videos of Computer Stew and daily audio of Comedy World. If you don't want to search for your chuckles, TopFive.com will e-mail you its daily humor lists.

All of these sites have one thing in common: There are comedy professionals behind them, gently guiding jokes to your browser. And if they're not pros, they should be.

What brings comedians to the Web? Nelson says it's "the freedom to write what we want ... and (we) thought, hey, we could post these (online) and other people could look at them."

Build it and they will laugh.

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TimmyBigHands
www.timmybighands.com

Modern Humorist
www.modernhumorist.com

Comedy Central
www.comedycentral.com

The Onion
www.onion.com

Computer Stew
www.computerstew.com

Comedy World
www.comedyworld.com

TopFive.com
www.topfive.com

NetFact: 91 million pirated music files are stored by 4.2 million Internet users in the United States.