The upcoming release of the latest movie in the Indiana Jones franchise is having a profound effect on comedy writers the world over.

After the WGA strike, writers are keen to flex their comedy muscles, and what better material to focus on than the pending “hyper trendy super crunch smash hit movie blockbuster”, to quote South Korea’s Seoul Tribune film critic?

The Lucas-Spielberg collaboration set to give Harrison Ford another crack at the whip is a milestone in US culture. But it’s not just writers on the god-fearing shores of America who are trampling over each other to write the best Indy gags.

A glance at a sample of the recent work submitted at just one comedy writers’ forum hosted by the United Kingdom’s Channel Four Network reveals a plethora of sketches featuring metal detectors, pirates’ treasure, burial mounds and even a pitch-perfect parody of a popular British archaeology series with some reality-television features.

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sees Harrison Ford reprise his role as lecturing globetrotter Henry Jones Jr, aka Indiana, to take on the Soviets in a Cold War-era adventure. Comedy writers, unable to contain themselves, are eagerly posting their archaeology sketches to websites once happy to host jokes on any subject.

Unfortunately, joke forums are now so overwhelmed with archaeology-themed humour that some of them have been forced to re-brand themselves as sites of historical importance.

“You go on these sites now and you see a topic called ‘FUN test’,” said one disgruntled anonymous reader who frequently browses the funny forums, “You click on the topic expecting a funny quiz and what you get instead is a complicated joke that relies on some knowledge of Fluorine, Uranium and Nitrogen analysis – known as a FUN technique – used by scientists to ascertain the age of fossils. I don’t know anything about that. And I then I don’t laugh coz my head hurts from thinking.”

So acute has the problem become that at the time of going to press, four popular joke forums have been converted into serious online academic institutions focusing primarily on archaeology and related sciences such as paleoanthropology, geophysics and radio carbondating.

How many more hilarious sites will fall to the academic adventurer’s whip and pistol? Only time will tell.