The Smithsonian wants you to help transcribe all 52,000 jokes in Phyllis Diller’s filing cabinet

CBC:

Diller’s act depended on an endless supply of gags. “Someone clocked me one night at 800 one-liners,” Diller told NPR.

Diller’s one-liners didn’t come out of a book. She kept her jokes in a steel cabinet on tens of thousands of index cards, categorized by subject and filed into 48 drawers. In 2003, Diller donated her joke archive to the Smithsonian.

The Transcription Center is enlisting volunteers to enter all of Diller’s gags into a digital database. As data entry jobs go, this one is not typical.

I’ve been doing this for the past week. It’s a lot of fun.