The Internet: An Abridged Guide to Communicating.

Firstly, forget everything you learned in Sunday school. If you didn’t learn anything in Sunday school because you either didn’t attend or didn’t listen, then congratulations on being doomed to hell for eternity. Anyway, It’s a common misconception that other internet users are people: they are not. It’s an easy mistake to make, often they will give a perfectly reasonable representation of an actual person, perhaps even simulating emotion, but there is one key difference: you will never meet them in real life. Because of this, you should never give a shit. Example: “I am a jew”, reply “You spelt filthy jew wrong.”, “I am German” reply “You spelt Nazi wrong”, “I am an Admin” reply “I am sorry”.

Secondly, you should never, under any circumstances, take anything anyone says seriously. You took that seriously didn’t you? No? Good. Serious is an archaic concept dreamt up solely to stop people laughing at the pope, before serious had been invented people couldn’t stop pointing and laughing at his hat. Are you talking to the pope? Does the pope use the internet? The answer to both of these questions is yes and no, and that’s exactly where serious gets you, debating the existence of the pope while laughing at his hat. Along with not taking anything seriously, you should also intentionally misunderstand everything that’s said, paying particuarly attention to those with weak english skills. If someone regails you with tales of their sexual conquests “I nailed this superhot chick last night”, try taking his phrasing literally and asking him “To what?”. Another tactic is called the humorists sacrifice. Essentially you sacrifice your own integrity, making a small joke about yourself to make a bigger joke about them. From the previous example: “Weird, last night I dressed up as a superhot chick and got nailed.”.

Thirdly, you need to become a master in the subtle art of sarcasm and irony. Sarcasm isn’t just saying what is not, it is saying what is and what should never be. You shouldn’t just be saying thank you when someone insults you, or writing songs about lemons while they’re trying to have a serious debate. If you really want to break hearts with biting wit, you’ve gotta give them a whole lot of love before smashing them with an ascerbic jibe. I could ramble on all day about this, in fact I could beat moby dick in both length and density, but I’ll try and bring it back home. Basically you want to add some extra flair to your sarcasm, something ridiculous that makes the sarcasm relevant: “ET:QW is the best game I’ve ever played” isn’t particuarly funny sarcasm, “After years of playing eye jabby with my friend stick, ET:QW is a breath of fresh air” isn’t either, but “ET:QW IS FUCKING AWESOME” is pant wettingly hilarious. 

Shakespeare told us that brevity is the soul of wit, but he also wrote long ass plays which gave me headaches in high school. So really, fuck him. If you want to write a whole novel, go ahead, you can even start copying and pasting excerpts of your favourite authors in there, it’s not like anyone’s going to actually read it. If you want people to acknowledge your comic genius you need to think quantity of posts not quality or length. By all means, have some standards, but don’t let those standards get in the way of posting. Take this journal for instance: it’s already too long, the only people left reading it are Rhand and flyingDJ, maybe meez too. Hi guys; it’s no where near funny enough, and there aren’t enough hilarious cat images or 4 chan memes from last thursday. Still, would that stop me from posting? Of course not, and it shouldn’t stop you either.

Remember to be careless, abrasive and, ultimately, hilarious.

Tags: commenting, how to be a dickhead, humor, internet