in-joke vs joke

in-joke

noun
  • Synonym of inside joke (“a joke that is understood or meant to be understood only by certain people who are aware of the details”) 

joke

noun
  • An amusing story. 

  • The root cause or main issue, especially an unexpected one 

  • A laughably worthless thing or person; a sham. 

  • Something that is far easier or far less challenging than expected. 

  • Something said or done for amusement, not in seriousness. 

verb
  • To do or say something for amusement rather than seriously. 

  • To dupe in a friendly manner for amusement; to mess with, play with. 

How often have the words in-joke and joke occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )