http://www.thejokejukebox.com

I would like some feedback on my joke website's overall look and useability. I'm thinking that the site needs a bit of 'jazzing up'.

Give it a look if you have a minute .. Thanks

The Joke Jukebox

This site could use some CSS to tighten up the tags. there is not really any tricky layout issues that would stop you from using
XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Maybe a slimmer paragraph width would not make the jokes text look so intimidating.

Excuse my ignorance, but can you be a bit more specific/explicit? I'm rather new at this ..

Pardon my harshness, XHTML is a standardized format of html, and brings structure to web programming. For example all tags must be closed:
<p>text here </p>

CSS (cascading style sheets) replaces nasty font tags and nested tables. You can find a pelethora of info on the subject from google. alistapart.com is a great reference
zeldman.com is another(the man who standardized the web) or at least convinced the community to start heading to standardized code habbits.

I can expand further as needed and ramble on for hours about this stuff. The bottom line is it saves designers time, and makes sites more available to a broader audience.

You should buy Jeffery Zeldmans book (zeldman.com) "designing with web standards" The best read ever on web design

Paul