The Internet Cracker Barrel, that is.

Okay, maybe it isn’t spam, but what exactly do we call the jokes that get forwarded around the Internet by friends who believe, often rightly, that thirty of their friends and acquaintances would also get a big chuckle (or a ROTFLMAO) out of the email they just received? And who exactly writes that stuff in the first place?

Not that I mind reading it. Even true spam has its own entertainment value, at least the first two or three times you get one of those emails with a cryptic evade-the-spam-checker subject heading that turns out to be just another Viagra solicitation. And I confess I still get a snort out of the “I’m the heir to the throne of Genovia but I need you to help me with the 20 million dollars I can’t find a safe place for in my kingdom” emails, especially because most of them are so full of good wishes and kind words; they’ve got more “God Bless”es than Red Skelton. But the cracker barrel spam, as opposed to true spam, isn’t about money. It’s about finding a room full of people who’ll all laugh together at the same joke. Sometimes I feel honored to be thought of as being in that room, and sometimes I wish the cracker-barrel spammers thought of me as in a neighboring bungalow instead, but often there’s good fun to be had even if the joke itself is either a) lame or b) one you’ve seen three or four times in a week.

For me, the real interest is in looking at the list of folks who got the email I got. That’s even more fun than tracing the path from the first CB spammer to the one who forwarded it to me. Tonight, for example, my 81-year-old father-in-law, who loves email (and what’s not to love?) and has a spiffy-diffy Dell computer with good horsepower under the hood, sent me some CB spam called “The OTHER Rules” that spell out the rules men want the women in their lives to know. That my dad-in-law sent that along was interesting enough, but I could see he’d also sent it to my brother, which means that at our next family gathering I can look at my brother and my father-in-law and merely say, with a significant tilt of the head, “Rule Number One,” and we’ll all fall about laughing hysterically. Well, my brother and I will. My father-in-law doesn’t do hysterics. Someone’s got to stay sensible at those mad gatherings.

And folks worry that computers depersonalize our lives.