Yes #2 · the honest one
Joke Vault.
Yes, and —
A joke machine that tells you, on the page, which of its jokes a human wrote and which ones it made up on the way to your screen.
Joke Vault.
The ruling
Grade B plusSay yes to the 1,142 it wrote by hand — the other 7,468 are the rent it pays to keep the shelf full.
Three frames, in order
Frame 1The shelf. Forty-one categories, and every single card prints two numbers: how many jokes are in it, and how many of those a person actually wrote. 
Frame 2The back room, on the same page. A dial that decides how mean the quality filter is, an engine that will build you one on demand, and a meter that will score anything you type. 
Frame 3And a plain search across the whole vault, because eight thousand jokes you cannot search is a landfill, not a library.
Why this is a yes
Every joke site is a scrape with a theme on it. This one wrote its own material and then refused to let you forget which parts. Open any category card and it tells you: 210 jokes here, 12 of them written by hand. Open the sheet and every single row says whether a person wrote it or an engine built it, and if an engine built it, which of the 24 comic forms it used. Nobody makes you do that. Doing it anyway costs the site its most impressive-sounding number.
Read the long ones first. There are 410, counted by us: exactly ten in every one of the 41 categories, all hand-written, and the file holding them says why the engine cannot touch them. A story is a build: three or four turns, and the last line has to reorganise everything above it. Fourteen sentence patterns cannot fake that, and the site says so.
“Anything. The meter does not care whose it is.”The placeholder in the Joke Vault's scoring box
Paste in the best joke you know and watch the needles move: late punch, economy, specificity, one idea, distance, and one more below the fold. It will not tell you whether the joke is funny — it says so plainly, and that restraint is the whole reason to trust it. What it measures is the six ways a joke fails: the punch arriving too early, the setup taking too long, three jokes wearing one coat. Those are countable, and scoring them in front of you is the most useful thing on the page.
Then say yes to the languages. Twenty of the forty-one categories are languages, and the hand-written ones are in that language, not run through a translator — twenty-four per language, 480 in total, laid out right-to-left where that is correct. The note explaining the choice: “a joke translated word for word is a sentence with the funny taken out”.
Now the shortcoming
The headline number is a ceiling, not an inventory. Your browser tab says 8,610. The vault you actually get says “Showing 8,569 of 8,610” — and it said exactly that on four separate loads we measured, because the house setting of the regulator hides anything scoring under 58, written or built. Forty-one jokes are missing from the shelf the title sold you — the site says so itself, which is admirable and still a gap. The cards inherit it: the vault's rule is two hundred short and ten long in every category, and the Puns card in front of us advertises 209. Nothing is hidden — but the tab and the shelf should agree, and the honest number is the smaller.
That is the B; the plus is for the bookkeeping. Yes, and — start in the long ones, then lose an hour in a language you do not speak.
Counted, not quoted
- Categories
- 41
- Long-form stories (counted: 41 × 10)
- 410
- Native-language hand-written texts (20 × 24)
- 480
- Hand-written in total, as the page states
- 1,142
- Built live by the engine
- 7,468
- Attempts the meter judged, per load
- 13,312
- Time to build them, four loads
- 82–98 ms
- Actually shown at the house setting
- 8,569
- Transferred on a cold load
- 545 KB
Measured by this desk against https://labs.llc/joke/ in a headless browser with analytics blocked at the network layer, 2026-09-22 at 22:36:57Z (89 ms), 22:37:4xZ (98 ms), 22:37:5xZ (86 ms) and 22:43:57Z (82 ms) — the vault read “Showing 8,569 of 8,610” on every one. The 410 stories and 480 native texts were counted directly out of the live data files fetched at 22:35:09Z; the rest are the page's own counters, read off the rendered page.