Humor and current events, do we want to encourage them?

Question

The recent question https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1951/how-many-frogs-were-supposed-to-go-to-the-moon-on-ladee was intended as light humor about a current event. While I believe it is important to have real questions about current events, and these have always been well received, humor questions are a different issue.

In my experience on sister sites, humor questions (and answers) usually are allowed to live for 24 - 72 hours before being deleted, and are generally well received (when well written and appropriate). Rep does not really come into play because it all disappears when the question is deleted.

While the example question is not particularly well written, the only other example of humor on Space is addressed here (and was much better).

If we wanted to encourage humor I would suggest a 'Humor' Tag be used/encouraged to clearly identify the intent, and that the work be deleted in the 24 - 72 hour range.

At the same time we are a young site, and are still looking to capture the attention of experts in the field, so bad humor could be counter productive. So it might be best to not encourage humor at this point.

Answer 1

As stated on MSO, here is the policy on humor.

Humour is allowed, so long as it is not the whole point of the question.

That is, if you are just making a joke or a joke question, then no, this is not allowed.

However, if you simply use joke variable names, or such code, that's fine.

Current events are encouraged to have questions as well, so long as they are of a somewhat durable nature. Asking about a frog hitching a ride might be okay in that sense, but not asking what time the next Falcon 9 launch will be (It just is subject to too much change)