If your goal in life is to create a comedy website, as is alleged in my case, eventually you’ll want to advertise it to someone who likes to read articles which they might find amusing. But the internet’s response in the past decade or more has been an unmistakable “Fuck you”, and I have to disagree. In fact, no, fuck you. Sites like Facebook, where you can choose categories for your blogs or sites or forums only have 700 options for food or travel or self-help that will one day soon be written by unmanned AI, but they’ve literally removed humor and comedy as selectable options because the world is a sad morass of news stories about pedophiles and hospital bombings. Excuse me for wanting to bring a little levity to the day, you corporate shitbags. You win though, because barely anyone will see this and that seems to be by design. Even Google doesn’t index sites the same way anymore.

Facebook, Reddit, Blogrolly, WordPress (though WordPress at least lets you add tags) etc. provide you with a strict bunch of weak, static categories that never veer into uncomfortable or inappropriate territory. Thicc, joke-rich paragraph comedy is being phased out, humor is only for memes that can be digested in mere seconds and forgotten just as fast. But it wasn’t always that way. In the 2000s, comedy writing was big. Something Awful, Fark, Maddox, Cracked and especially Seanbaby. It’s all corporate now. And some of the time it’s just the transcript of a podcast. Wtf? Get that shit out of here! If I wanted to listen to people be funny, I’d watch stand up, where I can also see them, which is lose/lose. Have you seen people? No thanks.

I’ll give some credit to publications like The Onion for doing something I would love to do: lampooning the news and current events, though I sometimes do do that. The Hard Times is great too… or I assume it is, because I don’t click past the headlines. For my part, I just don’t want to risk stealing jokes, but I assume people read it.

The great thing about comedy is that, at least for another few years, AI won’t really be able to replicate what makes humans funny because a lot of it is bitterness and cynicism the depths of which no robot can comprehend. Self-deprecation is the lifeblood of comedy. You can’t learn to properly roast someone unless you know how to roast yourself – Chinese proverb, probably. And I’ve tried using AI to reply to an argument but it comes off as a middle schooler trying to be as insulting as possible without swearing. AI insults are like getting every sandwich with mayo as the only topping forever. I never use AI in writing, and it’s not so much that it’s cheating as that it’s that I can do much better without even trying. Again, maybe a few more years. Then Skynet will be writing all the monologues for Jimmy Kimmel and we’ll be too busy staring in slackjawed amazement and pride for the little AI that could, that we won’t hear the steel scraping against steel of the Terminators coming to murder us.

My solution: we rein in AI and bring back written comedy in a big way. More funny people need to team up to create websites where humor is rewarded and is always a category. If anyone out there wants to collaborate, hint, hint. Until then, this is just me shouting into the storm. Maybe in a decade, people will realize I was right all along when the only humor you can find that’s written by humans is sites like this one, and that’s depressing – see? Self-deprecation.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled AI-written top 10 best hidden gems of the west coast or How to properly huff paint in 2026.

Exo