We all love to rag on the poor old internet, including myself. It’s a time waster, it’s corrupting the youth, Bitcoin mining is bad for the environment somehow. But it’s not like we were all doing anything that great before we were online either. I mostly just sat around on an inflatable green couch rereading Garfield comics, and the day my parents got the internet at our house, the first thing I did was type www.garfield.com into the address bar to pick up where I left off.
Everything on this list made me laugh the first time I came across it and also made me laugh just thinking about it. Some of them are very recent, some of them are like nostalgic memories that seem lost to time until I remember everything is online forever and I can just look them up right now.
1. Toilet Water by Jamie Linn Watson
There’s a same-iness to comedy videos that are made for Facebook, mostly because for some reason we all decided that the only way to go viral is to put the conceit of the sketch in big block letters, like someone with a megaphone standing next to you yelling THIS IS THE JOKE right in your ear.
But there’s a looser, more freewheeling type of comedy video that tends to go well on Twitter and Instagram which I really get a kick out of. There’s no pressure for the video to be “relatable” – just funny. This one by American comedian and actor Jamie Linn Watson is a great example of the form, about a girl who for some inexplicable reason gets toilet water all over herself, and tries to be cute about it.
why does this happen every time i stay at a guy’s place 🤦🏼♀️ pic.twitter.com/ppxra5C99F
— jamie linn watson (@PB_andJamie) March 15, 2021
2. Moon’s haunted
This tweet is better than any space film. And I bet someone saw it and is pitching it around trying to make it into a space film. But even if it does get made, it won’t be as good as this tweet. Perfect storytelling.
nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
— dustin Couch (@Dustinkcouch) October 30, 2018
astronaut: moon's haunted
nasa employee: what?
astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted
3. Jazz Friday by Please Don’t Destroy
This is by a sketch group called Please Don’t Destroy and I’m a big fan of their stuff. Their Twitter videos are super lo-fi, shot on a phone and everyone talks over each other; all the things you’re not meant to do in TV comedy. I love it.
This sketch is about a guy who gets the memo for the office Casual Friday very wrong. There’s something so funny about people who don’t own up to their mistakes and instead dig in their heels; the type of people who are wonderful in comedy and infuriating in real life. It also features the funniest thing you can say before punching another person.
4. Bird on a bird
I mainlined way too many funny animal videos in the mid-to-late 2010s, to the point where today I get no joy from them at all – a type of overexposure similar to what we went through with Jennifer Lawrence films around the same time.
Well, this bird on a bird may have found its way into my deadened heart.
Today I saw the impossible pic.twitter.com/GXc8RO1eyQ
— The Feel Good Page ❤️ (@FeelGoodPage11) April 24, 2021
You simply have to applaud a bird for discovering a life hack for getting around. I just keep imagining it having its big Neil Armstrong moment as it stepped on to the other bird’s back and realised what it was about to do. A trendsetter. In five years’ time, all the birds will be getting around like this. Or at least half of them will be.
5. Colin’s bear animation
Speaking of sad animal videos, when I was writing this I tracked down an old favourite video of a bear at a zoo waving to people in a car which I used to find hysterical, and when I saw it my first thought was: “Oh noooo, that bear is probably very sad.”
I am happy to report that my other favourite bear video remains as perfect as it was when I first laid eyes on it as a uni student in 2007. Watch it with sound on.
6. Big Aussie Trash and Treasure by Ben Russell
Ben Russell is one of Australia’s best comic performers and is on my list of Why The F*ck Doesn’t This Person Have Their Own TV Show Yet (TV execs, if you’re reading this, HMU).
This is a pitch-perfect parody of those classic blokey lifestyle shows that takes a very dark turn. I reckon if they aired this on 7mate, no one would blink an eye.
7. Strong Female Lead by Michelle Wolf
Michelle Wolf’s TV show The Break proved that white men in suits behind desks weren’t the only people who could host late-night shows. Sometimes white women could do it, standing up, wearing sneakers! It was sharp and cool, the sketches were top notch, and like many other cool shows before it, it was cancelled after one season.
8. 5 Times the Animatronic Fox on Splash Mountain Addressed Me By Name and Told Me He Was Going to Marry My Dad by Clickhole
The creators of The Onion pivoting to Clickhole was such a genius move. They went from parodying straight newspaper formats to parodying the viral news sites right at the exact moment we all started losing our minds and began the moderately fast slide into online insanity. It’s completely absurdist nonsense, which is all our melted pea brains can process any more.
Do not look for meaning in this. It’s not there.
9. BBC interviews the wrong guy
I’ve included this one because I thought maybe you might have forgotten about it, and now you’ve remembered it, and I hope it makes you as happy as it makes me. In case you are a 15-year-old and you were a baby when this happened, BBC News mistakenly grabbed a man waiting in their lobby, thinking he was an expert on digital music. He was not, but he did the interview anyway. A lovely reminder that everyone is winging it, all the time.
10. The alto part of All I Want For Christmas Is You
I have a deep suspicion that when teachers audition kids for school choir and sort them into parts, it’s not so much about vocal range as it is about first impressions. Are you destined to stand up the front belting out the melody in your little blonde pigtails, or are you condemned to sing alto, to drone the weird unsexy harmonies that no one wants to hear? I was an alto kid. Now, at Christmas, I play it on repeat and sing this part loudly. Alto kids, rise up.
Beyond thrilled 2 share my holiday single "All I Want For Christmas Is You But Just The Alto 2 Part From When My High School Chorus Sang It" pic.twitter.com/ytwhDXAoHB
— Natalie Walker (@nwalks) December 23, 2016
Alex Lee is a comedy writer and performer. She’s a co-host of The Feed on SBS, and the host of ABC’s upcoming game show Win the Week
