Humortadela

» see humortadela.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

flash cartoons were one of the few things on the early web that genuinely crossed borders. a swf file was small enough to send and needed no translation when the joke was visual. it arrived in turkey the way it arrived everywhere else, as an attachment or a link somebody pasted into msn. what did not cross was the local part. humortadela was the local part.

it went up on 3 december 1995, founded by sergio batista, which makes it older than most things anyone remembers about the brazilian web. by the early 2000s it was the country's pioneer humor site with a catalog of flash animations built around its own recurring characters, tadelino among them, plus a steady run of cartoon versions of brazilian television personalities and politicians. there was a rapid-fire joke section and a set of browser games alongside the animations.

the jokes were the wall. a cartoon that works by exaggerating a specific tv presenter is unexportable by construction, and that is exactly why it mattered at home. brazil had a humor site making fun of brazil in portuguese, years before youtube gave every country a place to do that. i could have loaded the page in 2003 and understood nothing except that the animation was good.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it published ~

the format was the flash short, two to four minutes, drawn cheap and timed well. that was the entire mode of the internet between roughly 1999 and 2006, before video hosting became something an ordinary site could afford. humortadela ran a full production line of it while the rest of the world was mostly forwarding single files to each other.

around it sat the things a humor site of that era needed to keep people coming back. a joke section updated constantly, and a chat where the audience talked to itself between updates. there were browser games too, with names people still type into search boxes. the animations were the reason to visit and the rest was the reason to stay.

~ the two deaths ~

the first end came on 5 may 2011, fifteen years in, and the stated reason was money. a site that depended on brazilian display advertising could not carry the cost of animators anymore. it was big enough that the closure trended on twitter in brazil, which is a decent measure of how many people had grown up on it.

then on 29 june 2012 it came back, and picked up fifty-two thousand facebook followers in two days. a company called orapois took it over and relaunched properly that august. the audience was still there. the economics were not, and this time the shutdown did not come with an announcement. it simply stopped being updated and by 2016 the site was gone.

~ what got buried with it ~

flash support ended on 31 december 2020 and that was the real burial. the site had already gone, but a swf archive with no player is not an archive. twenty years of animation became files nobody outside a preservation project can open.

what survives is on youtube, uploaded by fans and by people who worked on the originals, at whatever quality a screen capture from that era gives you. it is more than a lot of dead flash sites got. it is also a strange afterlife for a body of work, sitting on the platform that made its business model impossible in the first place.

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