Modern Humorist

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

~ the last words ~

Modern Humorist ran on American context and had no plan for anybody without it. The material was built out of Talk magazine and the Raelian clone hoax, out of the exact texture of US media in the years either side of 2001. I was seventeen in Ankara on a dial-up line, reading English well enough to follow every sentence and still missing about half the punchlines. That is a specific kind of distance: not a language barrier but a reference barrier.

It started as a side project. In 1999 John Aboud and Michael Colton put up TalkMagazine.net, a parody of the magazine Tina Brown had just launched with Harvey Weinstein's money. The Drudge Report picked it up and the noise was loud enough to be worth something, so the two of them turned it into a company. Carlin Ventures put in around a million dollars. A media consultant named Louis Giliberti added another hundred and fifty thousand and took an executive job that came with it.

Both founders had come through the Harvard Lampoon and then into magazines, Colton at Brill's Content and Aboud at TV Guide Online. The offices were in DUMBO, on the Brooklyn waterfront, which in 2000 was the correct address for a company insisting it was an entertainment business rather than a website. The board had the film producer Frank Marshall on it and Jon Stewart, two years into hosting The Daily Show. Thirteen people worked there full time at the peak, with something like two dozen Harvard alumni feeding it copy from outside.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

New material every weekday from May 2000. The house style was the deadpan document: a memo from an office that should not exist, or a FAQ about something that does not take questions. Holy Tango of Poetry ran poems whose titles were anagrams of the poets' names. The Jim Morrison Simulatron was a Flash toy. MP3s equals Communism was a straight-faced pamphlet arguing that file sharing was worse than Hitler, which in 2001 was a joke about the recording industry rather than about anything else.

Three books came out of the site, published by Crown, including My First Presidentiary in 2001 and One Nation, Extra Cheese in 2002. There were live theater shows and there were television projects sold. The Webby nominations for Humor arrived in 2001 and again in 2004, and the Onion won both times, which is the whole competitive position of this company in one sentence.

~ the postmortem ~

The crash did not kill the site directly. It killed the people funding the site, which amounts to the same thing on a delay. By November 2001 the thirteen full-timers were gone and the company was hiring writers per project. The founders have since described it plainly: the investors went out of business, so everybody got laid off.

Publishing stopped in 2003. Aboud and Colton stopped being executives and went back to being writers, which is what they had been before somebody handed them a chief executive and a board. They wrote for film and television and turned up as talking heads on VH1's Best Week Ever, where a lot of the early-2000s internet went to be recycled on cable.

~ the long tail ~

The site is still up. modernhumorist.com answered with a 200 in 2026 and has answered with a 200 every year since it stopped publishing, which makes it dormant rather than dead. The front page is not a redirect or a parking form. It is a note the editors wrote themselves, calling the site a semi-functioning archive and a monument to the talent and derangement of its writers, and opening with a line about the glory that was Modern Humorist, still cherished in the memories of its tens of fans.

Under that they list where everybody went. The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show, Mad Men, plus a run of novelists and cartoonists. One of them ended up as the DJ at Fenway Park, which the editors concede wins. Somebody paid to keep this online for twenty-three years after the last new joke, and redesigned it once in 2011 for good measure. That is not how most of the graves on this site end.

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