ZUG.com

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

~ the obituary ~

ZUG started in 1995 as a weekly comedy page written by John Hargrave with a rotating set of collaborators, and for most of its life it made the reasonable claim of being the oldest comedy site on the web. The format was long-form written comedy at a time when that mostly meant a text file with a header image. In 1998 it added a threaded board called GAB on ZUG so readers could post their own material, and the board slowly became the actual site.

Between 1999 and 2001 Hargrave's attention went to Computer Stew, a daily comedy web show made for ZDNet, and ZUG ran in the background. When that show was canceled the site came back with a redesign, a daily blog and a taste for stunts that generated their own coverage. One ballot-stuffing campaign aimed at HBO's Aspen comedy festival pushed enough traffic at HBO's servers to knock them over and get ZUG disqualified, which the site treated as a result rather than a setback.

The pranks got Hargrave a book deal. Citadel Press put out Prank the Monkey in 2007 and it sold well enough to put him on the Amazon humor list, and Penguin followed with a book of pranks for nine to twelve year olds in 2009. The board was renamed ZUG Live in a 2008 redesign and kept running as a scoring game, where posters chased a monthly ranking of the funniest people on the site. On 21 March 2013 Hargrave announced the site would stop, and on 1 April it did.

The English-language prank genre never had a real Turkish counterpart, and the humor I was reading online in the same years lived on forums rather than on somebody's personal site. Donanımhaber and frmtr were where a joke got made, usually in a thread, usually by someone whose signature block listed their hardware. That is a different machine for producing comedy than one man with a credit card and a video camera, and it exports much worse.

~ the case file ~

~ the pranks ~

The recurring bit was the credit card. Hargrave got real cards issued in fake names, one of them under Giant Monkey, and used them to test whether anyone in the payment chain was actually checking anything. He also got a card opened in Ashton Kutcher's name. The joke is about the gap between what a signature is supposed to prove and what a cashier looks at, which is a security argument wearing a comedy costume, and it is why a magazine for corporate security officers ended up interviewing him.

The other famous one was physical. In February 2007 he got into Dolphin Stadium before Prince's Super Bowl halftime show carrying light-up devices, on the strength of a suit, a Bluetooth headset and the willingness to ask people for help. People who did not believe it was possible decided he had faked the whole thing.

~ zug live ~

Readers could submit articles, the staff picked the ones worth running, and everyone else voted for a Funniest of the Month title. Series ran for months at a time: one reader posted profiles of serial killers to dating sites, another went bar to bar looking for the worst drink available anywhere. On the board itself, posters gave each other funny points, formally ZUGZ and known to everyone as orbs, and competed for a monthly list of the world's funniest people.

All of it ran on software built in house, with jokes wired into the machinery, including a swear filter that made its own contributions. A comedy site that writes its own forum is rare, and it is the reason the community stayed where it was instead of drifting to one of the big boards.

~ the last day ~

The announcement came eleven days ahead, which was enough notice to say goodbye and not enough to mirror eighteen years of writing. When the site went down it took the articles with it, staff and reader alike, and the ZUG Live archive went with them. Hargrave moved on to Media Shower, a marketing company that still operates, and the comedy back catalog was not part of the move. What survives is whatever the Internet Archive happened to crawl and whatever made it into the two books, which means the pranks that were filmed got out and the writing that came first mostly did not.

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