The Phormer Phat Phree

An Archive of Funny from The Phat Phree, the Pinnacle of Internet Humor Before Video (c. 2005-2007)

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You Don’t Root for My Team?!

College football fans in a nutshell.

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Hi, I’m a Golfing A-Hole

Pretty self-explanatory.

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So You Just Gave Blood

I had basically forgotten about this one. It’s a one trick pony. Might’ve made a good sketch on The State or something. I thought it is pretty funny toward the end. 

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What Was That Noise?!

This is another very early piece I wrote. In law school or shortly thereafter. I published it on The Phat Phree a few years thereafter. I think it still holds up, and is in a style that I think I still write in today: something mundane, discussed in detail, as many jokes as I can pack in without making it a standup routine, and a healthy dose of absurdity.  

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New England Islands, A Gazetteer

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I would occasionally do cartoons, parody magazines or comics, and other graphical pieces, like this one.

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How I Really Met Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother was a thing then. So was me hitting a “rough patch” in my dating life. Looking at it now, it’s self-pitying and misogynistic, and also not really that funny. Exaggerated at the end, but otherwise is sort of a true story. Pretty lame, just with the How I Met Your Mother bit thrown over the top of it and a dark joke at the end. Oh, well. Glad that (being single) is over!

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Top Cities for Seniors!

Five cities, five jokes. Nothing special here.

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The Tao of Golf

I was playing more golf back then, I suppose. I like this one. In a lot of stuff, I tried to take real Taoist sayings, or Aesop’s fables, or whatever, and repurposing them or adding some absurd gloss on them. I think that can take a single, pretty lame joke (Keep your head down! and a few other golf/country club absurdities) and give them a bit of a higher-minded angle so they’re funnier, and more substantive.

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Aesop’s Phables

Pretty straightforward bit here, but I really like this one.

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Damn You, Journey!

OK, back to some better ones. This actually might have been the first piece I wrote for TPP because I remember writing it before I started writing for them, probably in 2004. I posted it on my own website that I had for like six months. This one got a little traction as well. At least, it popped up pretty high when you Googled Journey. I knew this because my roommates girlfriend was a huge Journey fan and found this online and loved it. She had no idea I had written it because I didn’t have my name on the site (because I’d just started my job as a lawyer and didn’t want my coworkers or clients seeing my stuff then) and shared it with her boyfriend who told me about it. I told him I wrote it and he didn’t believe me until I showed him the file on my computer and the website, etc. So, at that point I knew I could write stuff that at least some people enjoyed.

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Red Tape Anxiously Awaiting Its Return

To show I am not hiding anything, I’ll leave this here. Nothing much to say, its pompous and terrible and cynical and just bad.

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Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt

Might as well put up some ones I’m not particularly proud of. This one was roundly savaged in the comments. I think it’s pretty funny albeit a little too straightforward and too long. As a young white kid living in the Central Valley of California in 1987-88, I loved NWA and Eazy-E. I listened to whatever I could on headphones so my parents wouldn’t catch me. It was really a cool feeling. Do kids today even have stuff that they’re not allowed to listen to, or that the whole country is up at arms about from politicians to the FBI to Tipper Gore? I don’t know what it would be. That feeling of transgression and doing something totally forbidden is a rite of passage that I think is missing for a lot of kids today when porn is at their fingertips and “cussing” has really lost all meaning or taboo.

For those familiar, this is basically the lyrics to ‘Nobody Move’ on Eazy Duz It, Eazy-E’s first solo record, done as a how-to guide. I think it has some comedic value because the robbery he describes in the song is so absolutely ridiculous and over the top. The song is practically a comedy track. So I didn’t think this was too bad as a piece of comedy. A lot of people didn’t know the song, I think. And if you don’t I can see how this came across as terrible.

All that high falutin’ shit said, though, it’s not great. It’s straightforward, too long, lacking any twist. It’s a one-trick pony. It’s not that funny once the initial conceit is figured out, and I feel a little weird about the cultural appropriation aspect of it today.

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What the Fuck is a Balk?

This was one of my earliest writings for The Phat Phree. It may have been the first even. I’m not sure. For a long time, it had the most views of any of my pieces, which numbered about 65 (pieces of writing, not views) after all was said and done. It even got some traction in those Web 1.0 days, appearing on some agglomerator sites and getting snatched and posted on some various other vanity or comedy websites, with or without attribution. Some guy even linked to it on the Wikipedia article for “balk,” although that was removed for being satirical.

This one represented my style in a lot of articles, which was to take absurdity and humor but to also add in some real trivia on the topic. Sometimes I would write it through some other voice or high-concept mechanism, like the pilot’s announcements in the Third World Airspace piece below. Other times I would  write it in a more straightforward essay style, like here. I was pretty proud of this one and think it holds up well.

The origin of this one was me, my friend, and my dad watching a 2004 or 2005 College World Series baseball game at a sports bar in South Omaha, Nebraska. We’d seen a game in old the old Rosenblatt Stadium on 10th street earlier that day and were watching the second one on TV around a bucket of beers. A pitcher for the team we’d bet on got called for a balk and we booed and what-the-fucked. Later, a pitcher for the other team threw to second and we were clamoring for a balk and throwing beer around. We realized the absurdity quickly and were making balk jokes the rest of the game. And here we are.

I like to think this is something George Will or Peter Gibbons or, more likely, George Plimpton would have written had they been active during an era when fucks were more acceptable, and if they weren’t pompous gasbags.

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Welcome to Third-World Airspace

This is one I really enjoyed writing. I had a lot of these kind of things, where it was basically some device to just go through things on a given topic that I found funny and taken them to ridiculous extremes. Whether giving blood, state airlines from really dysfunctional countries, things A-holes say while they’re golfing, etc. I hope it’s legible enough. I only have these on PDF so I might need some better way to upload them. I don’t want to do transcriptions and re-add the photos separately. This way, you can kind of see how it looked on the site originally.

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What I Would Have Done Differently as Yoda

This is a random one of mine. It wasn’t the first or the last, but it was weird and I always liked it. I don’t have dates when any of these were actually published. I downloaded all mine in June 2008 when the site was starting to get spammed a lot and it was looking obvious it was going down because I would get malware warnings sometimes when I visited. Also, a lot of the early authors were gone by then. I only managed to download my articles, one by one, as screen grabs turned into PDFs over the course of several days. In fact, I think I had to screen shot them, then print them, then scan them into PDFs. 2008 was a weird time. I am also bad at computers. Then one day, the site was gone. Hard to believe that was nine years ago already.

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Remember Reading?

From the earliest days of humanity, people wanted to laugh. Well, first they wanted food, shelter, and sex. But then they wanted to laugh. And so too with the earliest days of the internet. Those who had it already had food and shelter, so next they wanted sex. So first, there was internet porn. But then! Then there was humor.

There was a time on the internet when connections were slow. Video too was slow, choppy, and hard to find. Unless it was porn. But besides the porn, video was rare. You had to download it for hours and then watch it. In those times, people took their humor the only way they could--they read it. So the early- to mid-2000s featured a lot of written humor. Jest magazine, Modern Humorist, Cracked, National Lampoon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Onion (in its own unique format), and others were all part of a brief flourishing of comedy taking advantage of late-web 1.0′s focus on the written word.

It was around then, from c. 2004-2007 that The Phat Phree answered the call for written online humor. For a few years, months, or weeks there, it was the place on the internet to find humor in that most accessible and ever popular of formats, the long-form essay. Picking up where the National Lampoon left off... in 1975... The Phat Phree provided a daily dose of 500 to 1,500 word essays that made the world, or at least a small humor-snob corner of it, laugh--or at least smile and nod in recognition of humor. From ‘Look at My Striped Shirt,’ to ‘The NBA All-Ugly Team’ TPP had a short, relatively minor, and ultimately probably inconsequential (though is humor ever?) run, and for those of us involved, it was a blast.

 A lot of people worked very hard on creating and operating the site in that time too, and every TPP author owes them their thanks. The Phat Phree’s success was even more remarkable considering it had no established brand. What’s more, TPP made its name in a time before social media, when if people thought something was funny they had to actually copy and paste the web address into an email to their friends. Unbelievable, I know. But word got around somehow and even though we were doing it for free, The Phat Phree’s authors all tremendously enjoyed being able to broadcast their funny thoughts to the world. Some even parlayed their TPP exposure to writing gigs in real life (back then we hadn’t yet invented the acronym ‘IRL,’ ed.).

Then YouTube (which had started in February 2005) really took off as broadband internet became ubiquitous around 2007-08, and especially after Google purchased YouTube in November 2006. Around then too, Channel 101 (a short-film festival IRL--sorry--started by comedy god and ‘Community’ creator, Dan Harmon) began streaming its videos online. This site was hugely popular among comedy nerds. It provided short-form and long-form humor videos and web TV series an online platform, where the videos were streamed as opposed to downloadable. Its content included early work by The Lonely Island and other pioneers of using online-streaming-video humor. Then Funny or Die launched, bringing the star power of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay to streaming-video comedy. Then College Humor got VC funding. Then Cracked invented the... list. And as all that happened, people voted with their mice and decided that they would take their humor in video form or not at all. With the possible exception of McSweeney’s, online humor in non-listicle, essay form was essentially dead by 2008. The Phat Phree couldn’t easily make the transition. First, writers scattered around the country. Second, it lacked the financial wherewithal to jump into making high quality videos, though not for lack of effort to secure such funding. Third, and primarily, I think, most of the writers were too damn funny to debase themselves by making videos of pranks and lists of CRAZY THINGS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND. So the Phat Phree withered away and died without much fanfare. (Not that there is usually fanfare at funerals.)

Today, The Phat Phree has basically disappeared from the Internet. No archives, no nothing. This is too bad because I think a lot of it was really funny.

I was a writer on The Phat Phree in those days. I missed the initial buzz, but joined shortly thereafter in 2005 and stayed on into early 2007, I believe. I am starting this blog to serve as an archive of TPP material. I will only be posting my TPP work at first because: 1) I do not have any other writer’s stuff and, as I said, there appears to be no record of it online, and 2) I don’t have permission to post other writers’ stuff even if I had it.

So, I will post my stuff from time to time on here. Any other TPP writers who happen to stumble across this blog: if you find this, just contact me in the comments or however, and I will send you the link to post directly on this blog whenever and however you want. I only ask that you keep it to stuff you wrote and which was published on The Phat Phree, not new stuff. That maybe we could do somewhere else.