Unfunny Things
A collection of pretentious things from the web and elsewhere that are much less funny than they think they are.
Sep 4th, 2011 @ 12:53 am
GG Guys
Nice one, right? It’s stupid but funny.
But that’s not where the comic ends.
We have these two stupid panels that wreck the punchline and make it groan-worthy. First, we’re told what happened when he entered the wrong bathroom. (Thanks for the assistance.) Then, we’re shown an array of other “W” characters that made the same mistake.
But this is not just an example of Buckley-box-style talking down to the audience. It’s a perfect demonstration of how “stupid but funny” humour is never all that stupid.
The reason the first four panels are funny on their own is due to the smart reference to the “inversion” aesthetic Nintendo uses for its evil Mario characters. It seems obvious that Wario would act as Mario’s opposite in any situation. It’s as clear as the letter on his hat. So when we see him in this ridiculous restroom situation, it’s funny that he’s made this mistake — so obvious to Wario, but so ridiculous to us!
But when Waldo and Winnie are thrown into the mix, it needlessly complicates the comic narrative and the observation hidden in the joke. These two other characters aren’t making the same kind of mistake Wario did. There’s not much cleverness to the idea that someone would assume a door labelled with their initial was the place to go. This is where a funny dumb joke becomes a dumb dumb joke, because the smart underlying observation we were all smiling at is now muddled and broken and not very insightful anymore.
Via GG Guys, cited in The Webcomic Overlook.
Aug 16th, 2011 @ 8:31 pm
Gatling Kitty
You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Via The Oatmeal Shop
Apr 19th, 2011 @ 5:03 pm
Encyclopedia Dramatica
Rest in peace.
I was never a real ED editor. I made about three articles and significantly contributed to another two. Besides that I just bitched at some of the Chris-chan obsessives and made a fuss when I noticed annoying articles featured on the front page.
But ED was something I cared about, perhaps for what it was once capable of being, more than what it came to represent: an archive of funny articles about internet drama. But now it is gone. The admins—sorry, “sysops”—killed it a few days ago. It now redirects to Oh Internet, a new, simplified wiki based on different software and a database of content that I think has something to do with the newly-defunct whatport80 (a prior attempt to re-build ED as a safe-for-work quasi-wiki.)
Wait, they killed ED?
Well, the wiki we knew as ED is no longer accessible. These guys have a text-only backup from February (loaded into MediaWiki here), and I assume at some point an ED admin will put up a final dump of the whole thing on The Pirate Bay for historical interest. But as it happened, the whole wiki was simply dropped, with no public warning, replaced with something totally new and quite unlike it. Millions of words and thousands of images, all substituted with a much smaller, safe-for-work, simplified meme database.
The reason that this is an Unfunny Thing is less to do with the sentimental feelings I have about 4chan jokes and more to do with a complex story about how fast-moving internet communities decay and become awful. The internet meme database business is perhaps the best example of this I’ve ever seen.
How things fell apart
ED began as something of an offshoot of 4chan and its associated communities, which in essence was an animu-focused group of communities formed off the back of Something Awful. I do not know what its original task was, specifically. But what it should have been was a chaotic wiki full of internet drama written in colloquial internet language. Instead, it awkwardly shifted between the very different purposes of internet drama catalogue, meme database, springboard for internet movements, and “rude” Uncyclopedia clone.
You can track most of this entropy with the word “lulz”. Most people find this word annoying, now, and for good reason. It has come to represent being a sociopathic idiot.
I know how it came to this. Apathy. From the admins and the ED community. The only rule that the admins kept to was that “more content is good content”. Write words, make it look effortful, and it’s a contribution. It became a part of ED culture.
I have two good stories about this. The first: my friend tried to replace an idiot’s self-indulgent self-written article with a shorter, funnier, more accurate one, and when an admin blindly reverted the change, he was suspended for daring to argue his point with an admin. The second: a non-admin user who went around deleting dumb Uncyclopedia-esque articles en masse, only to be told off and banned after all his changes were reverted. Not a single page he deleted had anything to do with internet culture, ED’s purported raison d’être.
This culture killed the site, and by the time it turned the wiki from mostly drama into mostly Internet Comedy Hour, the admins just gave up.
girlvinyl: ED fucking sucks and is a pox on the face of the internet.
girlvinyl: And as such I have pretty much 0 interest in dealing with it.
SuitCase: It still kind of frustrates me. I love the idea of ED and I think its best articles are fantastic. I also like the voice that evolved from it, the racism etc, I think it’s funny and has a kind of spirit to it all that makes it fun to support and identify with. The problem has been that there’s been no real direction or reinforcement of what the site is supposed to be about, and I think that’s really regrettable. Like, new users will come and fuck things up with articles that even if they were funny really shouldn’t be on ED, yet nobody breathes fire down their neck for being idiots, they’re either permitted or the rest of the community laughs at how they described a historical war leader as pwning noobs in a battle and it goes on and on.
girlvinyl: Yeah, it’s stupid and crappy.
SuitCase: Do you regret the way it is? […] From my perspective, the userbase has gone to shit and [the admins] are too permissive and have no vision for the wiki overall.
girlvinyl: Yeah, that is all pretty true
girlvinyl: I just don’t care about it
And what a waste it made of a busy community full of funny people eager to cut down terrible people.
“lulz. Common usage: doing something of abnormality online.”
In short, they stopped cataloguing what leads to “lulz”. Dumb kids got the definition wrong—see the headline—and nobody corrected them.
My best effort at encapsulating what “lulz” should have meant is pretty simple: “pleasure derived from provoking and/or observing unjustifiable internet rage”. It’s what ED was supposed to be about: trolling lame deviantART artists, documenting the nonsense that goes on in small web forums, occasionally posting flashy gifs on epileptic support forums. Amusing things, designed to teach dumb people lessons about how to lighten up.
But if you looked at its usage today, “lulz” is simply the newfag’s tough guy way of saying “lolz’. It doesn’t really define anything, but it tends to accompany all sorts of “bad behaviour”. Perhaps its dilution was unavoidable, as people came along and tried to impress people by being mean for the sake of being mean (no better exemplified than by the horrible mess of sad retributive nerdery that became the Chris-chan harassment community), but unlike in /b/ there was never much of a concerted resistance against those doing it wrong.
With no real conception of what ED was about to work by, it’s no wonder that ED users progressed from posting useful, interesting articles about internet drama to organising bullshit pop culture rallies against nonsense causes like Scientology.
Progress
And now we’re left with this.
“Oh Internet”. Where over nine thousand articles have been culled to a few hundred. A lot of which have interesting facts about internet drama llamas like Jared Lee Loughner. I don’t have much to say about this site that you couldn’t conclude for yourself, but it’s not hard to draw a comparison to Know Your Meme, the internet culture encyclopaedia your dad can use. (Or buy out.)
Great.
Mar 23rd, 2011 @ 6:30 pm
Party Cat (and Nedroid generally)
<Zaynman> it’s party time
<Zaynman> http://nedroid.com/2009/05/party-cat-full-series/
<SuitCase> this is the “miss” part of why nedroid is hit or miss
<Zaynman> I like parties
<Zaynman> suit, you don’t like parties?
<SuitCase> i don’t like shitty humour
<SuitCase> and that’s shit
<SuitCase> gunshow style self-conscious absurdism
<Zaynman> we should party to take your mind off of it
<SuitCase> i will admit the final panel in the last comic on that page is reasonably funny but the series sucks
<SuitCase> yeah, it’s the sort of thing designed for people to repeat so they can proudly affirm to the world that they got the joke and are similarly whimsical
<SuitCase> and by that i mean party ;)
<Zaynman> :)
<SuitCase> you are an idiot.
Via Nedroid
Oct 14th, 2010 @ 11:16 pm
The Oatmeal
Feb 19th, 2010 @ 5:54 pm
Boxer Hockey’s Sonic Comics
Boxer Hockey is a boring comic about video game dudes. But that’s neither here nor there. A recent break from the story lead to a clusterfuck of terrifically unfunny Wacky Sonic Comics that take the worst of 4chan newfaggery and random humour. The end result is absolute shit that’s being eaten up by the Sonic community. And presumably Tyson Hesse’s existing fans, but who cares about them.
There are four of these comics.
I will deconstruct the last one for you. You can do this to any comic, and good comics can stand up to it. Find a funny comic. Try it. The jokes are identifiable and good! The jokes in this are not.
Panel One: Sonic is acting out of character here. You will notice this is a theme repeated often. Notice that he calls Eggman a “dick” while he lights a cigarette. I believe this kind of joke stopped getting a reaction from sensible people after they read their third MAD magazine in the early 1970s. Knuckles is making a funny pose like a gorilla and saying “ooh” - I think this is a non sequitur joke, or it’s just furthering the idea established in comic #120 that Knuckles is a crazy character.
Panel Two: Again, a funny face and exaggerated pose. Knuckles is clearly zany. There is some permutation of pies and cheese humour here in his question about “this eggs man”. I suppose it’s acceptable that he might not know how to say “Eggman” having only heard the name once, but the emphasis of this panel is on the fact he said it wrong, and that makes it very unfunny instead of something that could accent a larger, more sensical joke. Instead, I suppose we are meant to laugh at the fact “eggs man” is nonsensical and just another instance of that crazy cat Knuckles doing his thing.
Panel Three: This is a mundane panel, with some more pointlessly wacky poses. I should point out here that it isn’t funny to do these over and over and over and over and over. Relentlessly assaulting the viewer with weird poses is not only inelegant, it’s unfunny—you need to pace this out for it to work. Watch an episode of Ren & Stimpy for examples of how to do it right.
Panel Four: Ha, so the eggs man is flopping about as he speaks too. I’m reminded of when I used to seriously tease people by repeating what they said in a retarded voice with retarded body movements to accent the effect. Actually, I never did that, but I kinda remember my contemporaries doing it when I was a preteen..
Panels Five, Six and Seven: Hey look, Tails looks retarded. Knuckles is being retarded. He is yelling “EMMEROWWWDS~”. Sonic is uncertain that he wants to call them his friends. Chortle.
Panel Eight: This is one of the only two reasonably funny panels in the comic, but it’s a very mild joke. I don’t think it’s all that wrong to satirise the fact that robots just appear in the games, as if there’s no effort involved in Eggman creating them, and I suppose this happens here as he exclaims “Boop! Robot.” I think that you can cancel out good jokes with bad ones really quickly, though, as seen in…
… Panel Nine. Tails Doll stopped being funny after the 20th joke made on The GHZ board in mid-1998 or whatever. It was a very dead horse by the time the rest of the Sonic community caught on to the joke and repeated it occasionally in the half-decade following. I can only assume this is Tails Doll (the website I am linking to is very intentional, btw), and that Hesse picked up on the joke that it was “EVIL! XD” that still circulates amongst the less socially able types that hang about online and still remember Sonic R.
Panels Ten and Eleven: I thought it was “eggs man”? Oh, I guess that was just random humour then. Anyway, the joke here is that Knuckles has blindly repeated Sonic’s assertion that Eggman took his emeralds, and that he’s stupid enough to think asking Eggman will have some kind of useful outcome for him. He also said “emmeroowds”. This really is not funny.
Panel Twelve: Oh, he directly answers “Yes”, with a funny face. What a turnabout from before when he was acting vaguely like Eggman.
Panel Thirteen: Bat-face. Face can be a funny suffix or component of a nick name, I guess.. it’s still kind of staid and hasn’t lifted us out of predictable mediocrity yet..
Panel Fourteen: Oh. I think this is the best panel, but again it’s a tame joke that’s cancelled out by the shitty jokes surrounding it.
Panel Fifteen: Knuckles is in love with the bat despite her looking like a real, hideous bat. How funny. I suppose this is what happens when you write a comic which has a punchline in every single panel, the final one can barely compete. Although in this case, it does, because it’s yet another ho-hum joke in an endless stream of random humour and funny faces.
So that’s it. This comic is designed for idiots, and should not appeal to anybody who appreciates comedy as something that relies on insightful observations, careful pacing and appeals to empathy and emotion.
Can you do that with Sonic? Sure. You can satirise elements of the games that are odd, dated, don’t make sense or reflect other interesting realities. You can make jokes that play off the characters and gameplay mechanics. Make jokes that relate to what players of the game experienced, or truths about the development of the game. they might not be great in execution, but if the ideas are there you can at least respect the purpose of the joke and imagine how it can be done better.
But a mishmash of 4chan expressions, John K ripoffs, and random humour is irredeemably vacuous, especially when thrown at you panel after panel after panel with no serious attempt at a meaningful structure behind it all. It is the comedic equivalent to masturbating 20 times in an hour, publicising it, and watching everyone around you proclaim you a sex god. It’s awful, inarticulate, sloppy, shitty and lazy and it’s utterly detestable that people like this. I hate this unfunny comic.
Via Fireball20XL
@ 3:16 pm
30 Rock
30 Rock is pretty bad. It epitomises the slick, hip, self-referential type of television designed very consciously to appeal to those who roll their eyes at your average braindead sitcom. And in some ways it succeeds—while gratingly proud of it, the premise is original and it feels to me like there’s a layer of Manhattan-television-producer-actor industry references that are quite clever.
That’s part of the charm, and part of the reason why this is a pretentious show that tries to mask its unfunniness. I don’t get those references, and they might not even be there, but their apparent existence sets you up to regard the show as a little bit above you. If some part just seems absurd or unfunny, you probably just haven’t worked at NBC long enough and you assume there’s something in it.
But there’s not. (Well, probably not.) The writing and pacing are all wrong, and jokes that would be passable in an unspecified sitcom are muddled up terribly here. For example, in an episode I saw, two bumbling assistants to Liz Lemon say this as part of an attempt to overcome a miniature flu epidemic in the building: “I want to go get something for the crew—to thank them, for being sick”. Oh but they didn’t mean that! How awkward! Ha.. ha?
Such a line is usually pulled off well in The Office, but like most of 30 Rock it can’t get it quite right. You can see that they’re reaching for the “Haha, I’ve made that embarrassing verbal mistake before!” moment that I’ve seen in Office-like awkward comedies but it’s just a little bit too unbelievable. If you laugh at the joke, it’s because it’s kind of a good joke and it is presented in a polished package, but when it comes down to it they fucked it up by going a little too far.
Think I’m being petty? Later in the episode, Liz is running away from sick people as she is urgently trying to cover up the flu shot mark on her arm, which she declared earlier she would not take on moral grounds. She bumps into a ghostly-looking “Kenneth the Page”, who notices the mark on her arm, and in order to get rid of him Liz says “You’re in a delirious state, you are dreaming and in this dream I am your mother and we are speaking French”. 10 minutes elapse and when her hypocritical flu shot mark is revealed to the crew, Kenneth yells out from the crowd insults her in French. That’s the punch line. I guess he’s still partly delirious.
Ha ha.. ha.. ha? You see what they did there, but it just wasn’t very good. 30 Rock pretends that it is funny, but you shouldn’t trust it.
Via NBC
Oct 30th, 2009 @ 6:05 pm
Rachel Maddow
Oh, I’ve been outdone.
Oct 1st, 2009 @ 12:27 pm
KC Green
Oh, KC Green. I should prefix this one with an admission that I’m not sure whether KC cynically cultivates his image, subconsciously panders to the hipster masses, or just happens to have been the right man at the right time. But he’s emblematic of the self-congratulatory ironic hipster humour disease that pervades the indie webcomic world, and he pisses me off.
It seems like I’m alone in this battle, sometimes. KC is admired by the ruthless personality assassins over at ED:
Has befriended or been otherwise pursued by all manner of indie webcomic royalty,
and is constantly sucked up to by his 2000+ Twitter followers.
His comics and drawings are passed around Something Awful’s PHIZ forum, where his blend of detached, geeky, self-deprecating absurdist comedy with a grotesque art style hits all the right buttons and gets a ton of praise.
Unfortunately, his comics aren’t actually very funny. Some are textbook examples of a promising buildup leading to a bland punchline:
Others survive solely on the fact he can draw funny faces, barely covering up piss-poor writing that’s derivative of damn near every other comic he’s ever drawn.
These kinds of comics are very marketable amongst the hipster elite. They’re offensive enough to be “clever and off beat”, but never incisive or original enough to really divide people. They’re somewhat inaccessible to the unwashed masses because of the non-sequitur humour, yet they’re protected from accusations of poor writing because “they’re just dumb and funny”. Horribleville in particular capitalised on the sure-fire winning combination of emotional warmth and sympathy with bland humour, leading everyone to declare it some kind of incredible introspection into the state of being a confused, uninspired artist with low self esteem. It’s no accident that this was the most popular of all his works. Not only can you, aspiring webcomic artist, identify with KC’s troubles, but you can prove to the world how clever you are because you can find a toilet joke funny at the end of your maudlin reflection!
It is indeed a difficult undertaking to nail off-beat, irreverent jokes one after the other. It is silly to dispute that. But to do a consistently mediocre job of it, churning out shit comics day after day while gleefully catering to an expanding fanbase all the while is not the way to go about it. No amount of modesty and occasionally genuine self-deprecation can forgive the fact that he churns out the same awful crap day after day and has seemingly no interest in evolving beyond it.
Postscript:
I have something of a stake in this battle. I am friends with people who are friends with KC. I have spoken to him briefly on Twitter and email. It’s my rough assessment that he genuinely lacks self confidence and has some personal issues, but he’s also the shit type of person that relishes compliments and quietly avoids the limited criticism he receives.
He’s not the only person in his clique that does this, and I can see why. It’s a smart strategy to build a following. This is where I have to repeat that I’m not sure if it’s cynicism, a subconscious desire, or whether he just so happens to have been born with personality traits that lead him to polarity in the current climate. No matter how you explain his success, though, he’s dishonest - just as resistant to critique as the eternally prideful Hapajap, and just as pleased by his fan base as Buckley.
Either way, I think it’s reasonable to deduce that KC’s humble persona is a pretension, and as most of his appeal derives from this, he’s a repugnant artist with a disingenuous body of work. Fuck him and the type of person he cultivates.
Aug 14th, 2009 @ 2:48 pm
Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me
This NPR radio show is a a funny thing, in the sense that it seems like it’s from another time. Best described as the “dad joke” of political satire, it gathers together a few has-been comics with a raucous audience and subjects various callers to a basic news quiz.
The problem with “Wait Wait” is not that the comics are particularly proud of themselves (though they are sometimes) but rather that the jokes are—in a word—safe. The whole show, including its format and hosts, feels like it was transplanted from the mid-90s, where chortles and guffaws were invited by any mention whatsoever of “sexual relations… with that woman”. These days they might find it equally wild for a panelist to appropriate the idea of “hiking the Appalachian trail”, but it remains my firm opinion that you have to be old and humourless to find this amusing.
Via NPR.org
Aug 11th, 2009 @ 10:41 am
Statement of intent
The purpose of Unfunny Things is to ridicule presumptuous comedy within the sphere of pop culture. You know, the type of comedy that thinks it’s funny but is definitely not. While bad humour exists everywhere, the type of comedy that gratingly appears very proud of itself is more often cult classic than mainstream, so don’t expect much on Ace Ventura 3 or Hannah Montana. Instead, as the sacred cows tend to annoy me the most on a personal level, expect more criticism of indie webcomics and “sleeper hits” that are popular, but only on the edge of the mainstream.
Please believe me when I say I’m not just being contrarian. The Scrubs, KC Greens and Colberts of the world are the things typically shielded from criticism by virtue of their fringe appeal - you’re either a fan or you have a vague impression that it’s hilarious, based on what your hipster friend told you the other day. These are the ones that may not be the most egregious to good taste, and may occasionally have a few good jokes, but are the most frustrating to anybody who sees them compared to instances of truly great humour. These unfunny things need to be cut down.
This tumblog intends to cut them down.
Jul 10th, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
Michael Moore’s new movie teaser
This teaser was played before movies in some American cinemas a few weeks ago. People did come down the aisles to collect donations.
This one kind of upsets me. I think at the time it was derided by most intelligent people as a joke that was dreadfully out of date and overdone. It certainly is, but it hurts me a bit to see someone I find generally likeable to do something lame like this. It makes you doubt the humour of any of his other stunts, which are similar, only better timed and better presented. I think Michael Moore can still be funny and incisive with political stunts (YouTube link), but this one falls flat so dramatically that it makes you doubt that he was funny in the first place.
This is the worst type of bad joke, the one that makes you feel guilty for laughing in the past.
Using Beethoven’s 5th like that is also very cheesy, btw.
Via YouTube
Jul 9th, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Scrubs
This is a terribly unfunny show, yet it is almost universally adored. It’s a bland TV drama in the guise of an off-beat sitcom. I am still trying to work out why so many people find it funny, but I think the way the bland drama is packaged in a comic shell causes people to feel like it’s somehow heartwarming and rewarding to watch.
It’s not. It’s shit.
J.D.: [to Turk] Okay, fine. Let’s just play… Tip Over the Trashcan.
[He tips over the trashcan]
J.D.: Okay, I win.
Janitor: Can I play?
[Janitor knocks JD’s stack of folders to the floor]
Janitor: This is fun.
J.D.: Yeah.
Turk: It sounds like you’re asking me out on a man date.
J.D.: Turk, why are you so afraid of loving me?
Elliot: Hm! Can’t believe Chuck gave up stripping to become a city councilman!
Carla: Same job, different outfit.
Watch the show. All the jokes are like this. It’s trite, repetitive, primetime sitcom shit. With a tinge of “your embarrassing friend who uses the word ‘random’ without irony”.
Via Scrubs’ “memorable quotes” on IMDB
@ 3:23 am
SnorgTees
I think this brand of shirts is meant to be quirky and off-beat. From their About page:
Welcome. SnorgTees got its start back in May 2004 when our group of friends decided that we weren’t meant for a real job. We got our options narrowed down to international jewel thieves or internet t-shirt tycoons. Since it was the middle of the summer, we weren’t able to find enough ski masks, which left t-shirts as our only option. Fast forward a few years and we’ve grown to the point where people mistake us for an actual business. We’ve even shipped a shirt to NASA. That means space. So technically we’re a universal company. But we are still just a group of friends who run Snorg because we enjoy it.
Oh you crazy fucking jokers.
Via Snorgtees
@ 3:04 am
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
What is this atrocious shit? Did I stumble into a rack of greeting cards?
Via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
