City of Juneau Launches Joke Hotline amid Coronavirus Pandemic: 'People Just Need a Laugh'

Volunteers record a new joke every day to be ready for callers by 10 a.m.

Knock, knock — it’s the city of Juneau, Alaska here to tell you a joke and give you a well-deserved laugh amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The City and Borough of Juneau is bringing light to a difficult time by launching a joke hotline, a city-sponsored phone line that people can call to hear a new joke every day, Anchorage Daily News reported.

The hotline, which kicked off Tuesday, is run by three volunteers — two high school girls and a retired man — who will come up with fresh jokes, seven days a week to record for callers.

“People just need a laugh,” Dawn Welch, a recreation planner for the city of Juneau, told the outlet.

The jokes are recorded by 10 a.m. each day so that people can call into the hotline at [phone] each morning for a good laugh.

Welch said that the volunteers provide “good, clean, corny jokes” on the call, and that while they come up with their own material, the public is invited to submit jokes as well by emailing [e-mail].

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The hotline was once used for the city’s hiking program, which has been suspended due to the pandemic.

“We thought, this is a perfect time to do this,” Welch told the News of using the line to tell jokes.

The joke hotline proved so popular, that the “overwhelming number of calls crashed the system,” the city wrote on Facebook Tuesday.

“Please standby as we work with the phone company to get us back up and running,” officials added.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there have been at least 327 cases of coronavirus and seven deaths in Alaska, according to The New York Times database. Across the nation, over 805,000 people have been infected by the virus and over 40,000 have died.

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