The problem with comedy being the new rock'n'roll, (or nearly new, or last-but one) is that everybody thinks they can get laughs. Take this supposition and add the internet, where everyone has a platform to show off just how hysterical they are, and you feel your initial smile turning into a rictus.

There's a lot of comedy out there but ploughing through the dross can be no laughing matter. Finding a good site depends on what you're after; TV comedy fans will find that most programmes have their own sites, whether official ones hosted by their broadcasters or fan efforts - a Google search on 'Only Fools and Horses' threw up an alarming 7,500 pages, a proportion of which will no doubt be about horses or sites with the word 'only' in the title, but there's a lot of interest in programmes out there. Luckily there are comprehensive database-based websites like comedy-zone.net; lots of info for the buff and casual logger-on alike in here. If live comedy is more your thing then most of the clubs have websites - there's also a valiant attempt at a comprehensive listings at priestess.co.uk/cc/list.htm, although it assumes you already know about the big names like Jongleurs and the Comedy Store.

Then there are the overt 'humour' sites. Some of these seem pretty funny at first but then you realise they're comprised solely of one joke. Extremeironing.com celebrates ironing in different locations and that's about it; http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mil.millington/things.html, the 'things my girlfriend and I have argued about' page, as seen in the Saturday Guardian as well as online, is just as one-tracked but gets away with it. B3ta.com takes a broader-brush approach, hoovering up comic sites and pages; worstoftheweb.com used to highlight the unintentionally hysterical but since a change of management a few years back it includes a lot of intentionally naff sites as well. Nostalgia buffs can always push off to punch.co.uk - the magazine might have died a second time but the website will serve up cartoons, sell you books and most amusingly it still thinks it's selling subscriptions. The rather healthier Private Eye (private-eye.co.uk) will sell you stuff in the same vein but also has new jokes and a magazine to back it up. beano.co.uk is also pretty funny even if you are old enough to know better - although since it lost the singing Bash Street Kids a couple of years ago maybe it's lost its edge.

Not that you need a magazine to be funny. The Friday Thing (thefridaything.co.uk) has had an understandably high profile among people who know about these things; it has most of the spikiness of Private Eye without any of the investigative journalism. Thebrainstrust.co.uk is just as funny and even looks like a newspaper, as does www.framleyexaminer.com - in fact the first time I saw it I thought it was a real local paper. Theonion.com satirises on a global scale and has been successful enough to spawn books and dupe journalists.

So much for the laughs - but wasn't the business of comedy writing deeply serious, or something? The answer is yes and no; yes it's serious when you get your first script rejected and then less so when you realise how much they actually pay for radio sketches. Unless you make it big it's effectively not worth doing, but if you want to master some of the basics you could do worse than to head off to planetcomedy.co.uk, run by a couple of refugees from Channel 4 who run workshops, take shows to Edinburgh and generally make a living getting the giggles. Buyers of corporate comedy sketches can go to entertainmentinbusiness.co.uk to hire Norman Pace and others. Comedy writing professionals wanting to contact relevant associations can always look in at writersguild.org.uk, which isn't specifically for comedy writers but it certainly welcomes them. Not everything that happens on the internet is immediately funny, of course. Receiving loads of junk mail is automatically unappealing, but someone's found an angle - John Land's spamletters.com consists of the replies he's sent to some serious spammers and the resulting correspondence, and a good percentage of it makes hysterical reading.

But for all that, probably the funniest thing on the web just lately has been brought about by consultancy PriceWaterhouseCoopers and its decision to change its name to Monday. To get people's brains around the idea it spent loads on the website at introducingmonday.com; unfortunately it neglected to spend a tenner on introducingmonday.co.uk. Someone else got hold of it, and if the lawyers haven't whipped it away before this issue comes out it's among the best laughs you'll have.

· Guy Clapperton used to write for Radio 4's Week Ending and Spitting Image