Modified On September 27, 2007
Mark Sullivan, writing for magazine PC World, has written “The 10 Funniest Sites on the Internet,” which can be read on MSN.com.
Along with sex and shopping, comedy is one of the biggest drivers of traffic on the Web. Especially now that a lot of regular people know how to post their homemade video and audio to the Web (along with clips from TV or radio), there’s an awful lot of funny stuff online. After months of exhaustive research, including lie-detector tests performed on laboratory rats, we’ve gathered a list of the funniest sites on the Web. Visit these sites and try not to laugh. Also, you’ll notice we’ve left off sites like Comedy Central and College Humor, which are funny but a little overexposed.
Yes, but they included the grossly overexposed Funny Or Die!
Although Sullivan says that the WWW is a much funnier place, “especially now that a lot of regular people know how to post their homemade video,” only one of the ten sites that were featured conforms to that model– eBaum’s World. (Funny Or Die has been, for lack of a better word, corrupted– a visit to that site displays videos featuring John C. Reilly and Bill Murray. And the original rollout, as every man, woman and child on the planet knows by now, featured the hilarious short “The Landlord,” by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, hardly regular people.)
eBaum’s World, is truer to the “regular people (who) know how to post their homemade video” ideal.
In an ideal Ten Funniest list– with care taken to avoid duplication or overexposed sites– eBaum should have made it to the exclusion of Funny Or Die.
We are in agreement with Sullivan on one site: James Lileks’ Institute of Official Cheer is a highly bookmarkable site. We stumbled across Lileks several years ago and he is a genuine wit.
Most of the sites are either good, but not funny and not intended to be funny (Found Magazine); rely heavily on irony and not so much on wit (Omodern, Mullets Galore, Engrish.com, Overheard in New York) or are mere oddities (Pictures of Walls).
One of them is produced by a giant ad agency to help Burger King goose sales of its chicken sandwiches. (The credibility of Sullivan and his list take a major hit here!) The print and electronic media, we fear, are slipping into a mindset where nothing on the WWW is worth covering if it lacks some sort of involvement from major media conglomerates or stars. They simultaneously fear it, are puzzled by it and are inclined to encourage its cooptation by the mainstream media outlets.
The article reminds us of similar ones from 1996 through 1999 when the mainstream media didn’t know what to make of the WWW. They ran one predictable feature after another that focused on such sites as The Camera Trained on the Coffee Maker at the Cambridge Computer Lab and similar sites, declaring them “hilarious!” The plan seemed to be to marginalize the internet and emphasize the frivolous and the mundane.
Of course, a lot of what was on the WWW back then was actually frivolous and mundane. But they could have dug a little deeper. We got the feeling that they were giving less than their all in the search for truly interesting sites. These feelings were reinforced when, in the first couple years of our magazine, we found it a frustrating experience to get the MSM to pay attention to our publication!
We still feel a bit of that frustration! Hey, Mr. Sullivan: If you do another similar article, include SHECKYmagazine.com! We’re not All Funny, All The Time, but we do run the occasional corker– Hitler Bunches of Oats, Cum Park Plaza– to name just a couple! (And, even though our blog contains a lot of somewhat serious contemplation of the art/craft/business of standup, we can’t count how many people have told us that they think our magazine is hilarious!?!? It seems as though the general impression is that we’re a humor site.)