Funny Websites

Not every comedy site earns a spot. We applied four criteria.

It's actually funny. The dominant filter. Most submissions are sites trying to be funny — that's not the same thing. The bar is "this made us laugh out loud at least once during review." Subjective, yes; that's how editorial works.

It has staying power. A comedy site needs an archive deep enough that one click pulls you in for ten minutes, not thirty seconds. Single-page joke sites earn their place if the joke is genuinely strong (Eelslap, Don't Even Reply, Endless Horse), but most entries here have hundreds or thousands of items in their back catalog.

It loads in under three seconds with no signup. Same rule as everywhere on BoredomBash — comedy that requires an email is comedy that loses the joke. We cut sites with paywalls, mandatory accounts, or aggressive interstitials.

It still works. Comedy sites die. Hosts get retired, hobby projects abandoned, brands shuttered. Around four times a year we sweep the directory; entries that 404, that get acquired and rebranded into something different, or that swap free content for paywalls get retired.

The directory grows when something new clears all four. It shrinks when something falls off one.

Funny websites as a genre map directly onto the history of the web itself. The earliest era — 1995 to 2001 — was the joke-page era: single-page gags hosted on GeoCities or university servers, weird domain names, no plan. Most are gone. A handful (Hampsterdance, the original Zombo.com) survived as cultural reference points. The Onion started its print run in 1988 and went online in 1996, making it the genre's longest-running continuous publication.

The 2003–2009 stretch was the webcomic boom. xkcd launched in 2005, SMBC in 2002, The Oatmeal in 2009. Cyanide & Happiness's first strip dropped in 2005. The format worked because RSS readers and bookmarks were how people found content — webcomics rewarded daily check-ins.

Around 2008 the platforms ate the publishing layer. FML (2008), Awkward Family Photos (2009), and the meme aggregators kicked off the user-submitted era. ClickHole launched in 2014 as The Onion's BuzzFeed parody — itself a parody of the era's content economics. Reductress, the women's-magazine satire, started 2013.

The 2018–present era is the strangest. Twitter and Reddit absorbed most casual humor traffic, but the survivors of the previous eras — the ones with their own sites and their own audiences — kept publishing. New entrants are rare and weird (single-purpose joke sites like Eelslap, Don't Even Reply's archive, Endless Horse). The dynamic now is preservation as much as discovery — keeping the genre's history accessible while the platforms churn through ownership changes.

What ended up in this category is everything still worth a tab in 2026.

This category gets reviewed once a quarter. Bot-tracked link checks run nightly. Reader submissions arrive through /submit/; we accept around three per month for the funny category. The bar is "would we genuinely recommend this to a friend who's bored, in the next two minutes, by name" — which is higher than fame and lower than perfection. Old entries get retired when the host site dies, when the funny content moves behind a paywall, or when the brand pivots to something different. We don't take paid placements; nothing in this list paid to be here. Editorial judgment alone.

If this category lands, the closest sister categories on BoredomBash are Parodies & Gags (single-purpose joke sites and prank pages — the spiritual descendants of Eelslap), Useless Websites (a broader genre with overlap — humor through pointlessness), and Internet Classics (the historical preserved-humor archive). Outside our directory, the canonical hubs for new comedy discovery are r/funny and r/comedy (volume), Defector for sports-adjacent comedy writing, and Hard Drive for The Onion-style gaming satire.

From the wider Degen Network portfolio