HaHaPlopPlop.com

Q: What goes Ha Ha Plop Plop?
A: A man laughing his arse off.

It's easy to forget just how shite the Internet was five years ago. Here's an example. Back in 1996, my moderately responsible job in the computer industry required me to give a presentation to my colleagues, on the subject of financial systems and derivatives trading. This was because I'd spent the previous year working on a system that processed daily trading information. However, as anyone in the industry can tell you, it's perfectly possible to work on the technical aspects of something like this while not having the faintest bloody idea of the principles behind it.

Some research was obviously required. Luckily, because of my role within a technical department of the company, I'd had Internet access for a year or so (unlike most other people at the time). So I fired up my trusty and long-since-dead SavvySearch engine (oh, those hellish days before Google), and trawled the web for an idiot's guide to the kind of trading that resulted in Nick Leeson getting his arse whupped. And I found it. But I also found something else, and it became one of the key themes of my presentation. And it was this: never trust anything on the Internet that announces itself as 'humor'.

I found the site of a rather good financial resource centre called Numa, who provided exactly the sort of information I needed for a glib 30-second summary of what brought Leeson down. But as they'd gone to all this trouble to produce a web site, they felt they couldn't just leave it there. Oh no. So they also had a section called Voila! Tillity, which described itself as their 'humor' page. Look at it. Now. It's terrible. The highlight (or otherwise) of the section takes the idea of Nick Leeson being English, makes the connection with Monty Python, and proceeds to deliver an excruciating parody of the parrot sketch based around the idea of a poor derivatives strategy. ("Mate, this strategy wouldn't 'voom' if you put four zillion dollars through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!")

Back in the day, all Web comedy was like this: pages which had to label themselves as 'humor' because you wouldn't have a hope in hell of spotting the jokes otherwise. And don't think I'm just picking on the Americans because of the repeated use of the US spelling: here in the UK, we didn't even have that. Still, times have changed, and as the web has mushroomed in size, the chances of finding genuinely funny stuff on there have increased dramatically. (Although the chances of finding cringey unfunny stuff are still pretty high.)

Pausing only to warn you that some of the material linked to here may be unsuitable for the young and sensitive, here are ten of the funniest sites on the web today, and a few of their close relatives.

The Onion
I said they were the guvnors when I reviewed their book Our Dumb Century some time ago, and that still stands. There are imitators, of course. Untitled Document is a patchy British attempt at replicating the formula, The Schmews is an out-and-out rip-off, while The Weekly tried its best but is currently looking like Information Superhighway roadkill. (Although the story of their legal battle with The Mail On Sunday is hysterical.) Meanwhile, The Onion continues to go from strength to strength. Their news stories are just the right side of believable, their regular and irregular feature writers show you the world from a whole new angle (I've always had a soft spot for Herbert Kornfield, the baddest mofo in Accounts Receivable), and their comparatively serious AV Club section gives you some excellent arts coverage as a bonus. With new stuff every Wednesday and an ever-increasing archive, The Onion leaves every other comedy site "wanking with envy", as Nige from Vids would put it.

Landover Baptist
Parody's an awkward thing to pull off at the best of times, but is most effective when it's indistinguishable from the real thing to those readers without a sense of humour: a trick that Landover Baptist have been endlessly repeating for some years now. Like a lot of people, I first discovered them when their story about Jar Jar Binks sex toys was forwarded all over the place. It pretty much summarises the Landover approach to satire: find a popular subject of the time, do some sort of crazed fundamentalist approach to it (for example, the article Rugrats: Television For Paedophiles), and wait for the gullible to stumble across it. The results are documented in the splendid pages of Letters From The Unsaved, in which every month dozens of people demonstrate the fine art of missing the point. Of course, the danger is that the satire sometimes has trouble keeping pace with reality. The over-the-top Christian movie reviews of Landover associate Betty Bowers are frequently outdone by the genuine article at Capalert, where a loopy approach to the detection of 'ignominy' in movie entertainment is combined with a wholly incomprehensible rating system. (Though not as incomprehensible as that of their Finnish counterpart The Movie Rat, who seems to imply in spectacularly fragmented English that amplifiers are an abomination against God.) Anyway, there's a whole archive of genuinely made-up rantings for you to terrify your friends with.

Zeppotron
We're all a little wary of web startup companies since the rather poor BBC2 series Attachments showed us how it was all sex, drugs and nude skateboarding. One of the few things that did work was the tie-in version of the seethru.co.uk site that the show was centred around, thanks to the involvement of some of the good people at Zeppotron, a fledgling web startup in its own right. The key creative member of the team appears to be Charlie Brooker: one-time cartoonist (his Superkaylo site is still lying around), now best known for the TV Go Home page, which produces a fortnightly list of unusually disgusting telly highlights. TV Go Home became the first official Zeppotron site, closely followed by Unnovations, a list of disturbing products that no home could really be without. As a lot of the Zeppotroners worked on Channel 4's The 11 O'Clock Show, there's occasionally the odd characteristic bit of atrocious taste masquerading as humour: but for the most part they provide all the Wrong Fun you can handle, with more on the way soon.

Popbitch
Bit of an odd one, this: strictly speaking it belongs in my earlier roundup of mailing lists. Popbitch send out an email every Wednesday night - or would do if their server wasn't completely bollocksed at the moment - containing scurrilous pop gossip, midweek chart predictions and lists of astonishing links (from All Your Base and assorted variants, through the Satanic secrets of SClub 7, to the dodgy German fetish site Stars On Crutches). Surprisingly, the site doesn't actually keep an archive of the weekly mails, though it does give you a sample and the opportunity to subscribe to the list. The site is primarily based around the most libellous messageboard on the Internet, where massively scurrilous allegations about pop stars are posted by members of the public. (As a precaution against litigation, the board's only open from 10am to 6pm weekdays so it can be moderated: but edited highlights from the board are posted on the front page at all times.) Other site features include randomly generated pop facts and the opportunity to warp Nicole Appleton's evil face: but Popbitch's greatest contribution to the culture has to be Gak Attack, a Shockwave game where the object is to fire lines of coke from a pair of tits into Daniella Westbrook's nose. The word 'addictive' was invented purely for this purpose.

The Brunching Shuttlecocks
Producing regular material for a comedy site must be a strain. Producing it daily must be even worse. Even grand masters like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew couldn't pull it off: their Timmy Big Hands site closed recently after almost a year of increasingly patchy updates. And yet the 'Cocks - armed only with a creative staff of two and some mates - seem to be able to do this in their sleep. Regular features include ratings of the things that affect your world, on a scale from A to F (most recently bar appetizers): movie reviews and advice from the Self-Made Critic: and frequent polls of the readership to sort a selection of concepts into the categories of Good or Bad. My favourite section is a fabulous collection of web toys, ranging from a tool that turns a list of hated people and objects into an Alanis Morissette lyric, to a Drug Slang Translator which reveals the hidden drugs references inside any web page, including this one. (I'm now Spank The Cigarette Made From Cocaine Paste And Tobacco, apparently.)

The Joe Cartoon Co.
Viral marketing doesn't work: tell everyone you know, says a rather good t-shirt currently on offer from Need To Know. And of course, it does work. Because you know Joe. Yes you do, don't argue. Ever been sent that animation file with the gerbil in the microwave or the frog in the blender? Well, that was Joe. And you passed it on to at least one other person, didn't you? And so the Joe Cartoon URL becomes embedded in the public consciousness. Joe does tons of this stuff on a regular basis, all heavily reliant on Shockwave technology but cleverly programmed so the download times aren't too outrageous. Unlike the content of his animations, of course. A huge archive gives you access to a whole range of cartoons you can view for yourself or mail to other people: before you ask, I've been sent at least six copies of his Monkey Looker already, thanks. And Joe's even got a special message for anyone who's offended by the content of his site.

Moose Mansions
This has all been a bit professional so far, hasn't it? Far too many corporate entities producing comedy for the masses, and not enough lone nutters just writing stuff they find funny and posting it on the web to see if anyone else agrees. Enter John, the guy who churns out an issue of Moose Mansions whenever he feels like it (which currently only appears to be once a year, unfortunately). The format of his page is pretty constant: a series of regular features, which are all archived in sub-pages of their own so you can see how they looked in previous issues. Gratuitous insults to female TV presenters (his current bête noir is Gail Porter), lists of zany but true names ("But please stop sending in 'Roger Boyes'. We don't want him!"), favourite butt-kicking links, photos of curmudgeons, lists of people who deserve to die, collections of crap email jokes... all human life is here. John also runs the best Father Ted page on the web, The Craggy Island Examiner, so we like him.

Nord Wide Web
Now nobody said that these sites had to be comprehensible... just funny. I must admit I hadn't considered the Swedes to have much of a sense of humour, but that was before I discovered Hatten Är Din. The principle behind this is gloriously stupid: take a Turkish pop song by Azir Habib, transcribe the Turkish lyrics as if they were Swedish, and then make a Shockwave video to accompany the song using the demented nonsense that comes out of the translation. A bit of research proved that, astonishingly, a lot of this sort of thing goes on: either accompanied by video (Ansiktsburk and Fiskpinnar) or not (Turkhits, featuring the English/Swedish hybrid Shitting Just Like Yoda). This research also led back to Nord Wide Web, a Swedish site dedicated to the coolest and funniest stuff it can find on the web. Yes, it's all in Swedish, but it's worth stabbing blindly at the links to see what comes out. You'll be rewarded by original material of their own - including some sort of bizarre guide to Swenglish, a Create-A-Nerd game, a video clip of the Chinese Highland Games and an English shop sign that's apparently rude in Swedish (the original link contains the description 'Perversa klubben').

Viz
"Viz is a humorous magazine produced in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Born in 1979, it continues to avoid topical political satire, instead concentrating on cheap laughs about farting, swearing and turds." Hey, they know what works. Viz is long past its heyday in the early nineties when it had a circulation on a par with that of the Radio Times: but it's still worth buying every bi-month for the odd chuckle. (And it's nice to see that they can still freak out the tabloids with strips like the cartoon adventures of Harold Shipman and Fred West - Harold And Fred (They Make Ladies Dead) - in the most recent issue.) The web site has had its ups and downs, and for the most part is still an archive of old material and an advertising billboard for the accompanying books. The two best features of the site are the ones that go beyond merely echoing the comic's contents. One is Roger's Profanisaurus, where readers send in rude words and phrases of ever-increasing obscurity: over the last few years this has built up into a splendid treasure trove of profanity and euphemism from around the world. The other is a series of downloadable toys to clutter up your hard disk. The most recent one of these is the Queen Mamagotchi, a virtual model of the Queen Mum that you have to feed with gin on a regular basis and keep away from fishbones. And if you think that's in bad taste, you'd better avoid the Fuckaroo! game downloadable from the same page.

Comic Relief
And finally, the ulterior motive. Like you thought it was a coincidence that this page was first published on Red Nose Day 2001? Get real. Once every two years, the cream of British comic talent gets together to raise money for charities in Africa and at home, culminating in an epic BBC telethon on Red Nose Day. The Comic Relief site will eventually hold audio and video clips of the show, although the expected highlight - Ali G interviewing David and Victoria Beckham - was the victim of a leaked transcript a month before transmission. As well as all this, the site has coverage of the various fundraising events across the country, details of the causes your cash is going towards, and all the latest news from Celebrity Big Brother (if it's still going when you read this). There are also things you can buy for charidee (new Harry Potter books, Robbie Williams' stuff, Dubble chocolate bars and that fucking useless Westlife single) and the opportunity to make a donation online, even if Red Nose Day was ages ago. Go on, you know you want to.

So have tons of fun with all of the above sites, but don't forget to visit that last link and do your bit for the cause. I'm certainly going to. Being a Cigarette Made From Cocaine Paste And Tobacco, and all.

Links

There are 100 links on this page in total. But if you only visit one, make it this one:

March 16th 2001