(FORTUNE Magazine) – A social problem rated less urgent than urban poverty and yet more serious than infected hangnails is the quality of the jokes on the Internet. Wait. Does one really have to explain what the Internet is? It was on the cover of Time, for heaven's sake. Oh, well -- it's a big, big, really big network that you get into via computers and that is said to give one instant access to all humankind's knowledge and wisdom. And yet the jokes are rotten. We discovered this upon being pressed for jokes by a young lady who happens to have received half her genes from yours truly, and who would therefore be expected to know a joke or two except that she recurrently allowed her mind to wander before the ancestor got to the punch line. And now she really needs jokes. She is into the teaching line of work, which means that she (a) is on the Internet and (b) is discovering that humorous anecdotes are never disdained by college students. During many years as a business journalist who occasionally gave speeches, one labored excessively to find jokes that bore some relation to the assigned topic. When the topic had to do with finance, one always worked in the scene ) from The Bank Dick, where W.C. Fields goes into a bar the morning after and anxiously asks whether he had spent a $20 bill there the previous night. The bartender says, why yes, you did, and Fields relievedly smiles and says, ''What a load that is off my mind -- I thought I'd lost it.'' Speaking to a gang of Francis I. du Pont brokers in 1972, one brazenly pretended this joke symbolized Wall Street's then-desperate back-office problems. But watching Russell Long in action several years later, we suddenly realized that relevance was overrated. Cajoled by FORTUNE into speaking before a business group on fiscal policy for the Eighties, Russell, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, got up and abruptly launched into the story of this extremely old couple in rural Louisiana who had been married for 85 years and now wanted a divorce. They were pressed by the magistrate to explain why they had stayed together so long if they hated each other so much, and one of them delivered the punch line: ''Well, we thought we should wait until the children died.'' One noted two things about the joke: (1) It had nothing to do with fiscal policy for the Eighties. (2) This was fine with the audience. Humor on the Internet is centered in a special-interest group that you get into by first finding the Usenet database and then typing rec.humor, which results in your monitor displaying an avalanche of witticisms manifestly composed by 11-year-old boys. Various grownups have recently begun sorting through the offerings and compiling the best of them in rec.humor.funny. In this database, which arguably gets you to the 13-year-old level, you can select your witticisms from various categories, the largest of which appears to be O.J. Simpson jokes. The least unfunny one we found has O.J. calling a limo service and being told by the dispatcher that there will be a 45-minute delay, to which he naturally responds: ''Great, I have some time to kill.'' One awaits rec.humor.funny.really.