Odd Todd

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

~ the obituary ~

In November 2001 I was seventeen and had never had a job to lose. Odd Todd was a joke told by a man in his thirties in New York who had just lost his, aimed at everyone else in the same position, and in the year after the dot-com crash there were a great many of them.

Todd Rosenberg was laid off in June 2001. That November he put a Flash cartoon on the web called Laid Off: A Day in the Life, about a guy in a bathrobe doing nothing all day and feeling both fine and terrible about it. It went around fast enough to knock his hosting over, which in 2001 was the only traffic metric that mattered because nobody had another one.

The cartoons traveled the way everything on Flash traveled, as a link somebody pasted into a chat window, and that part reached Turkey. A four-megabyte SWF over dial-up was a decision you made in advance and then went to do something else while it happened, so the ones that got watched were the ones enough people had vouched for first.

What did not travel was the premise. Unemployment in Turkey in 2001 was a currency crisis rather than a punchline about a bathrobe, and the year the American internet spent laughing at itself for going broke was the year the lira lost half its value.

~ the case file ~

~ the tip cup ~

There was a link on the page called the Tip Cup, and people used it. Rosenberg took in several thousand dollars from strangers who thought the cartoon about being broke was worth not being broke over. The New York State Department of Labor noticed.

The state's position was that a website taking money is a business, and a man running a business is not unemployed, so the benefits he had already collected should come back. In July 2002 a judge disagreed and let him keep them. Almost nobody cites the ruling, but it is one of the earliest times anyone official in the United States had to decide whether a donation link on a personal website counts as running a business, and the answer it gave shaped nothing and predicted everything.

~ what it became ~

Comedy Central picked the character up and developed it as a half-hour show, then downgraded it to a web series, which is roughly what happened to every web-native property that got a television meeting between 2002 and 2005. Warner Books published The Odd Todd Handbook in 2003.

Rosenberg kept the site going for two decades after the joke stopped being current. He eventually went into screenwriting and his first produced film arrived in 2020. The site outlasted the situation that made it by twenty-three years, which is longer than most people stay in any one job.

~ the long tail ~

Flash was switched off at the end of 2020 and the cartoons stopped playing. The last version of oddtodd.com tried to work around that with Ruffle, the emulator that runs old SWF files in a browser, and carried a note from Rosenberg on the front page saying he was trying to get the site live again. He wrote that he had built it all stupidly the first time and that it broke every time he tried to move it. Anyone who wanted to take on putting it back together was welcome to email him, though he promised it was a big mess.

That note was the last thing the domain ever served. The final crawl that got a page back landed on 10 December 2024, and every attempt since has come home with a 403 and nothing behind it. The cartoons themselves sit in the Internet Archive, and a pile of them are on the YouTube channel the note pointed at. The work survived. The site did not.

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