Now, brace yourselves, because this article is going to be
about Stuff On The Internet That’s Not Funny.
“What are you saying?” I hear you cry. “Everything on the
internet is charming and hilarious! Only last week my nextdoor neighbour sent
me an adorable picture of a slow loris offering a banana to a kitten,
accompanied with the gentle pun ‘I Find You Ap-peel-ing.’ This is the sort of
quaint humour that the internet, a bastion of love and human knowledge, was
made for. Please, oh please, don’t sully my view of it.”
Or perhaps that’s not actually what I hear you cry. Perhaps,
instead, you’ve learnt the hard way about human nature through the darkest
corners of the world wide web. No, I’m not talking about hardcore sadomasochism
here – after all, everything seems consensual. Instead, I’m talking about the
non-consensual violation of my dignity that is regularly enacted through a
seemingly endless stream of ‘Someecards’.
Think you’re not familiar with Someecards? You are. Check
this one out:
NOT FUNNY. And this one:
NOT FUNNY. And this one:
STILL NOT FUNNY.
Someecards have a far-reaching remit, and that’s why they
keep popping up on your Facebook wall if you, like me, have idiots for friends.
This one, for instance, could win awards in passive aggression:
While this one features a complement of retro imagery with
socially backward thinking:
If you need to get anymore old fashioned, consider this
hilarious ‘museum’ card which pretends to be from 1921 for your amusement:
Oh, ho ho ho! What japes. Truly, this is a hilarity that
hasn’t been matched since someone substituted ‘Eat Cake’ for ‘Carry On’ and
sold kitsch cake trays emblazoned with the phrase ‘Keep Calm and Eat Cake’.
The reason these e-cards really get my goat is that they
destroy sarcasm for everybody. Sarcasm was meant to be the lowest form of wit
apart from all the other forms, and I built upon that as a teenager – it was
basically my only solid investment into adulthood. Now Someecards are doing exactly
what RBS did with my other investments: trashing them, sharing them around
odious people, and then co-conspiring with the government (probably.) And if
the denigration of sarcasm isn’t enough to send you baying for the creator’s
blood, then consider another list of virtues I’m pretty sure Someecards have
ruined: office-based internet browsing in my lunch hour, common decency,
feminism, intellectuality, all that is sacred in the world, and rates of global
literacy as people withdraw children from primary schools in their droves. Why
learn to read when this drivel is all that gets shored up as you idle at a
screen in your mid-twenties? Why risk possibly suicide-inducing disappointment?
If you think that I’m overreacting to a potentially harmless
memefest that I could just ignore with the click of a button, consider that The
Huffington Post does a regular column called ‘The Funniest Someecards of the Week’. One week, this featured ‘Congratulations from only being 19 babies away
from your own reality TV show’ and ‘Sometimes I run out of unproductive things
to do as work’ as examples of exemplary
humour picked by people on one of the largest publications in the world.
This is an epidemic of unfunniness. It’s an assault on comedy, the likes of
which we had previously only seen during painful, fleeting glimpses of a TV
rerun of Gigli. Something’s got to give, because the entry on Wikipedia
(traditionally renowned for its accuracy) for Someecards actually describes them as ‘clever parodies’. Is this the world you
want to live in?
If you have felt even slightly moved by my heartfelt plea,
please take it upon yourself to de-friend anyone on your social networks who
henceforth post a Someecard with anything other than ‘WHAT IS THIS TOTAL SHITE’
written underneath it. This will force the Someecard subscribers into a pool of
easily identifiable, practically friendless individuals, where they can then be
shipped off to Unfunny Island along with Michael Macintyre and forced to listen
to jokes without punchlines all day long.
Ladies and gentlemen, your country needs YOU.
