Print
E-mail
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Comedy Web sites get tiresome after a while. The Internet gives us access to more information than anyone could read in a lifetime, yet so many of us skip past all the brilliant material available at our fingertips. Instead of news and scholarly articles and every written work whose copyright has expired, we bookmark sites filled with moronic sight gags and flash games where you can pretend to shoot celebrities who everyone hates.
SomethingAwful.com is different. It’s better than E-baum’s and the slew of Web sites like it. It’s funnier and smarter than any site with flash cartoons. In fact, a daily visit to Something Awful makes all other comedy sites pretty unnecessary.
Something Awful’s primary goal is to riticule the rest of the world. It reviews video games and movies using a negative points system to express just how bad things are. The highest a movie or game can score is a zero, although it has never happened. The worst is a negative 50.
But Something Awful has branched far beyond reviews. It attacks every aspect of Internet and computer culture. Some features are funnier in their premises than the actual product. The highlight is “Photoshop Phriday.” Each week, Something Awful’s fans submit hilarious photoshopped pictures based on a weekly theme. One week, they recreated classic Far Side comics with Photoshop, resulting in some brilliant submissions.
You probably know someone who says tasteless things instead of actual humor in order to elicit shocked laughter. Something Awful isn’t like that. Sure, it gets some shocked laughter, but a lot of its jokes are meant to shock that tasteless person you know.
Something Awful has many running features, and a few that are now defunct. The newest one is called “Your Band Sucks” and features a reviewer who claims to be a NASA scientist who, therefore, knows everything. He has attacked Coldplay, Tool and the Strokes, and once wrote that “loathsome pseudo-intellectual college boys used to have ponytails; now they have Radiohead. God help you, you stupid, gullible infants.”
Another brilliant feature is “Truth Media,” which gives completely false reviews of popular bands and movies to attract hate mail from their stupid fans.
There’s too much to describe in a short review. Sure, you could be spending your time more constructively, but if you’re not going to be doing anything useful, you’d might as well waste your time and bandwidth on the Internet’s Mecca of comedy.
Related Posts:- Web monkey (October 2, 2003)
- Web monkey (October 9, 2003)
- Web Monkey (February 5, 2004)
- Web Monkey (September 18, 2003)
- Web monkey (January 19, 2004)
