Wikipedia:Unusual articles/Popular culture, entertainment and the arts
Appearance
Popular culture, entertainment and the arts
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Action Park | "There's nothing in the world like"... hiring untrained teenagers, plying guests with alcohol, and letting the accidents stack right up. Most infamously poor ride idea: a water slide with a vertical loop, so dangerous it was barely ever open. |
"The Aristocrats" | A joke considered to be both "the world's funniest" and "the world's worst". Also a 2005 documentary of the same name. |
Balloonfest '86 | One of Cleveland's most infamous celebrations. |
Baseball metaphors for sex | Two of America's favorite pastimes. |
Beezin' | A fad in which people apply Burt's Bees lip balm to their eyelids. |
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A unique experiment in "broadwebcasting", Bigipedia is the website on your radio. In association with Chianto—"Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product or by-product". |
Boston cop slide | A slide in the Boston City Hall Plaza playground that became famous after a viral video of a police officer emerging from the slide going upside-down at an abnormally high rate of speed. |
"Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!" controversy | T-shirt slogan aimed towards young women, rocks aimed towards young men. |
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A fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1927, and, except for his "service" in World War II, has been continuously enrolled at the school ever since. |
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They've been sabotaging each other since 2005. |
The Campaign for North Africa | The world's most complex board game. It has 6 rulebooks, is estimated to require 20 years to complete, and despite being released in 1978, not a single game has ever been finished (even though the actual campaign for north Africa only lasted 3 years.) |
Conan the Librarian | A perennial parody of Conan the Barbarian that has appeared in film, television, comics, and fan fiction. |
Croydon facelift | A hairstyle peculiar to parts of England. |
Cultural depictions of Napoleon | Fictional characters believing they are Napoleon are often used to suggest mental ill health. |
Cultural history of the buttocks | A cheeky article. |
Chicago rat hole | A decades-old rat-shaped hole on a sidewalk in Chicago that garnered international fame in early 2024. Pilgrims made offerings of coins, flowers, toys, food and much more. |
Christo and Jeanne-Claude | A pair of 20th century artists that became famous for their colossal side ecological works, such as 1972's Valley Curtain and 2012's The Floating Piers. |
Dick joke | Jokes about dicks. |
Evil clown | A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements. |
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The worst-reviewed tabletop role-playing game of all time, where you roll for your character's anal circumference and can listen to a theme song that "sounds like the Cookie Monster chasing a drum kit being pushed down a flight of stairs". |
Flash mob | Wherein a group of people quickly meet up, engage in a random action such as a pillow fight, then disappear just as quickly. |
Frozen Peas | Orson Welles: brilliant director, notorious pitchman. |
Fuck for Forest | Do your bit to save the rainforest—have an orgy! |
Ashrita Furman | Holds the Guinness World Record for holding the most Guinness World Records. |
Garden hermit | In case you are in need of some backyard friends. |
Ghost riding | A trend popularized by hyphy culture. |
Gongoozler | A person who likes to watch British canals. |
Great Stork Derby | What could possibly be in the will of a notorious practical joker? |
Gurn | A Western term for creating odd appearances of the face. |
Hacks at MIT | Large-scale pranks and practical jokes, mostly involving Harvard. |
He lücht | Like a German Jungle Cruise, Hamburg port tour guides tell such tall tales that "He's lying" has become a name for them. |
Human rainbow | A huge gathering of colours. |
Hundeprutterutchebane | A rollercoaster themed around dog farts. |
Issei Sagawa | Writer, commentator, minor celebrity, murderer, and cannibal. |
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Why did the K Foundation burn a million pounds in cash? |
Kayfabe | In professional wrestling, the portrayal of events within the industry as real. |
Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly | Claimed to have survived five shipwrecks, three car crashes and two plane crashes, and still found time to create a craze for sitting on a flagpole for hours at a time. |
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When children's toys attack! |
Kuchisake-onna | A Japanese urban legend (probably). Also known as "the slit-mouthed woman", Kuchisake-onna is asking you if you think she's pretty. No matter what you answer, you're doomed. Except if you say "pomade" three times. |
Lawnchair Larry flight | Successfully piloted a lawn chair to 16,000 feet (4,900 m) over Los Angeles. |
Le Pétomane | A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for being able to break wind at will. Practitioners of this... art are called flatulists. |
Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend | An old classic for those who like a laugh at the expense of the US Navy. |
List of defunct amusement parks | I thought Marine World was open! Darn it... |
List of games with concealed rules | Games with clear, obvious rules can be so boring. |
List of incidents at Walt Disney World | Did you think that Mickey's home would only be a place of sunshine and fun times? Think again. |
List of stories set in a future now in the past | Some aged well, some not really. |
Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend | Turns out, they have a bit of similarities with each other (not really). |
Love lock | Padlock your love to a fence, and throw away the key. That is if it doesn't get removed first. |
MacGuffin | An object whose value lies in its ability to kick-start a plot. |
Masturbate-a-thon | It's okay – it's for charity! |
Metafiction | Fiction about fiction. |
Miss Bumbum | An annual beauty pageant to find Brazil's best buttocks. |
Mooning the Cog | Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington. |
Nazi chic | The approving use of Nazi-era style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture. |
No soap radio | A prank joke intended to fool one of its listeners into believing that it is a joke. |
Robert Opel | The life and eventual murder of the streaker of the 46th Academy Awards. |
Pass by catastrophe | Has your college just burnt down? Congrats, you now have a bachelor's degree! Sadly, that isn't really the case in reality. |
Ping pong show | You've heard of baseball metaphors for sex, now get ready for... |
Pen spinning | An activity in which assorted tricks are used to manipulate a pen in aesthetically pleasing ways. |
Purple Aki | Do not let this man touch your muscles. |
Radio Yerevan | The "radio station" with the widest reach in the Soviet Union, despite having no transmitters. |
Aron Ralston | One tough guy who, to escape from death, cut off his own arm with a dull knife after a boulder fell on it. Inspired the movie 127 Hours. |
Real-life superhero | All you need is a cape and a dream. |
Sardarji joke | Popular jokes in India, based on stereotypes of Sikhs. |
Self-referential humor | A joke that refers to itself as the joke. |
Sewer alligator | A legend that became a pop culture sensation. |
Stunting | The things radio stations and TV networks will do for attention. |
Treacle mining | The fictitious mining of treacle (molasses) in a raw form similar to coal. |
Tube Bar prank calls | A series of prank calls to a bar in Jersey City, New Jersey during the 1970s, where two pranksters would call for double-entendre names, such as 'Al Coholic' and 'Phil Mypockets'. A recording of it inspired a running gag in a very well-known sitcom. |
Umarell | Old people who watch construction sites. |
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement | A group of people trying to get everyone to stop reproducing. |
When a white horse is not a horse | A Chinese philosophy about a white horse either being a horse or not being a horse. |
Willy's Chocolate Experience | A world of pure imagination... if you can only imagine empty warehouses staffed by underpaid actors, where the main attraction is lemonade. |
Works based on dreams | Sometimes you should follow your dreams; after all, it might lead you to create the most-covered song in the world, write Frankenstein, or discover the structure of the atom. |
World Famous Bushman | A street entertainer in San Francisco who makes a living by pretending to be a bush. |
You kids get off my lawn! | I'm gonna call your parents, you kids! |
Art
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747 | A performance art piece in which the artist fired shots at a Boeing 747 flying overhead, leading him to be questioned by the FBI. |
America | A fully-functioning solid gold toilet, formerly on display (and available for use) in one of New York's finest art museums. |
Artist's Shit | A quite literal and humorous meta-art. |
Australia's big things | Giant folk art as tourist traps. |
Augsburg Book of Miracles | A book dated from the 16th century full of weird religious drawings. Featuring a human–donkey–demon hybrid as one of its highlights. |
Babylonokia | A clay Nokia phone with cuneiform keys. Was once misrepresented as an actual artifact. |
Bliss (photograph) | The most viewed photograph in all of human history is... the default wallpaper for Windows XP. |
Bog Standard Gallery | It's a museum... inside a portable toilet. |
Boll Weevil Monument | The only known monument built to honor an agricultural pest. |
Joachim-Raphaël Boronali | The world's most artistically-tailed donkey. |
Bottle Rack | A modern art piece created by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. His sister, who mistook it for trash, threw it out. |
Pierre Brassau | "That's not art; a chimp could have painted that!" |
Cabazon Dinosaurs | Comprises of "Dinny the Dinosaur," a larger-than-life, 150 ton sculpture of a brontosaurus in the desert of Southern California west of Palm Springs. Dinny's companion is "Mr. Rex," a 150 ton sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Made by people that think dinosaurs never existed. |
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A very interesting hill figure in the English countryside. |
Chamber of Art and Curiosities, Ambras Castle | A cabinet of curiosities created by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria in the 16th century. |
Cool S | A symbol of uncertain origins often used in graffiti. |
Degenerate Art exhibition | When the Nazis exhibited examples of art that they didn't consider "purely German" enough, so people could hate it in person. It ended up drawing visitor numbers that regular art galleries in the country could only dream of. |
The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife | An 1814 Hokusai woodcut of a woman getting intimate with a pair of octopuses, sometimes described as the originator of tentacle erotica. |
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The effect of a picture appearing within itself. |
Disumbrationism | A novelist who's never picked up a paintbrush before creates a false art school and submits amateurish paintings as part of it... and is successful for a while. |
Earring Magic Ken | How Barbie's boyfriend, in an attempt to look cooler, became a gay icon. |
Ecce Homo | An otherwise-unremarkable fresco of Jesus that was "restored" by an untrained amateur and now looks like a monkey. |
Equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, Glasgow | Has been regularly topped off with a traffic cone since the 1980s. |
Fire photography | The act of taking photographs of firefighting operations. |
Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square | The horse is missing. |
Fremont Troll | An 18 foot, 13,000 pound concrete sculpture of a troll clutching a Volkswagen Beetle. |
Fuckart & Pimp | Going all the way to own your own art. |
Gävle goat | A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism. |
Geostationary Banana Over Texas | An Argentinian artist's plan(?) to launch a banana-shaped airship over Texas. |
Hahn/Cock | A giant blue cock in Trafalgar Square. |
Headington Shark | An Oxford man has had a 25-foot (7.6 m) long sculpture of a shark embedded headfirst into the roof of his unassuming house since 1986. |
He-gassen | It really puts the "art" in "fart". |
Hellmouth | The entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art. |
Hobby tunneling | Some people just love to dig. |
Howard Hallis | An artist who attempted to draw the "Picture of Everything", a massive painting containing drawings of thousands of people and items, both real and imaginary. |
Megumi Igarashi | Perhaps the world's most prominent in the field of drawing and sculpting the vulva. |
Jazz | An iconic 1990s disposable cup design. |
Katrina refrigerator | Loot this! Free meal inside! |
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NYC hip hop graffiti knitters. |
Kryptos | A sculpture on the grounds of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency containing four encrypted messages, only three of which have been solved. |
Latte art | The best art is caffeinated. |
Latrinalia | The sage and insightful scribblings on your local public bathroom wall. |
List of largest photographs | Includes information on print and digital photos that are reputedly the world's largest. |
Musca depicta | For some reason, a lot of artists wanted you to think a fly had landed on their paintings. |
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A Museum "dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of really awful artwork". |
Emil Nolde | The curious case of an artist who was an avid supporter of Nazism, yet was later featured in the country's "degenerate art" gallery. |
Paintings by Adolf Hitler | The Nazi dictator and perpetrator of one of the worst genocides in history was also a painter. |
Pantone 448 C | "Drab dark brown", the least attractive colour, according to research. Used for plain tobacco packaging. |
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Does the Washington Monument, Ypsilanti Water Tower or Peoples Daily building remind you of something? |
Pink Lady | In 1966, a woman secretly painted a 60-foot (18 m) tall portrait of a nude woman over a tunnel and sued when the county tried to take it down. |
Piss Christ | A photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. |
Portland International Airport carpet | A carpet design so famous that it gained a cult following. |
Pricasso | A man who paints with his genitalia. |
La Princesse | A 15-metre (50 ft) mechanical spider which stomped about Liverpool in 2008. |
Project Graham | A work of art "symboliz[ing] the vulnerability of human bodies in [car] crashes". |
Abel Ramírez Águilar | A Mexican sculptor who made a name for himself in ice and snow sculpture after winning gold at the 1992 Winter Olympics. |
Le Rêve | A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn, not accidentally poked a hole in it, and which eventually did sell for a different record price. |
Roundabout dog | Seen any dog on the loose while out driving lately? Chances are it's a roundabout dog. |
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There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman. |
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism | Mine is better than yours. |
Seedfeeder | An illustrator who contributed around 48 free-use drawings to Wikipedia, each being sexually-graphic drawings for articles on each (in)appropriate act. Lives up to their name, don't they? |
Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel | A spin-off of the famous medieval book Pantagruel, about the adventures of a gluttonous gigantic being; in the illustrated book, we can have a clue of what that wonderful fella dreams at night. Spoiler alert: it's all hellish creatures. |
Superlambanana | A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana. |
Tennis Girl | Photo of a girl with no underwear that became so popular politicians began to cosplay it. |
Thomasson | Finding the art in things that are still maintained despite being useless. |
Tillie | An odd painting of a grinning face, that used to be on the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, New Jersey before it was demolished. |
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A very... curious mechanical toy created for Indian ruler Tipu Sultan that represented his feelings for the expansionist East India Company on the Indian sub-continent. |
Trump, the Buddha of Knowing of the Western Paradise | A surreal Buddha-ified statue of Donald Trump, promoted on Taobao with the slogan "make your company great again". |
Turnip Prize | The prize that satirises modern art by giving awards to low-effort collections of junk. Bonus points for titling it with a bad pun. |
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space | At least sixteen casts of this "unique" sculpture exist. Not to mention that the sculptor already made a few similar designs. |
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An artist who drew self-portraits after being diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease in 1995, and would continue these portraits for six years, until 2001. |
les UX | A French artistic movement that expresses itself in underground places. |
Comics and animation
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101 Uses for a Dead Cat | A collection of illustrations all about exactly that - its first edition sold over 2 million copies. |
Aachi & Ssipak | A South Korean animated film about a dystopian future where poop is used as a power source. |
Acme Corporation | Their products have been used and endorsed by all the best cartoon characters. |
Afghanis-tan | Central Asian history has never been cuter. (Osama bin Laden makes an appearance as a turban-wearing stray cat.) |
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The team-up you thought would never happen. |
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Teenagers somehow become worthy game. |
Arm-Fall-Off-Boy | The first applicant to be rejected from the Legion of Super-Heroes. His superpower was the ability to temporarily detach either arm and use it as a club with the other. |
Behind Closed Doors (book) | An unreleased book of pornographic SpongeBob SquarePants drawings by some of the storyboard artists, partially leaked in July 2023. |
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo | Name of a Japanese manga whose subject matter is as surreal as its title. |
Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown | A slasher-themed parody of the Peanuts TV series with a mass-murdering Charlie Brown, whose director went on to work for Disney. |
Cartoon physics | In animation, humour takes precedence over the ordinary laws of physics. |
Censored Eleven | A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people. |
Cheat Slayer | An isekai manga axed after just one chapter when it was noticed that the villains were thinly-veiled clones of other isekai heroes. |
Corona-chan | A fictional personification of the coronavirus which caused racial controversies. |
"Cow tools" | A cartoon from the comic strip The Far Side that was so confusing thousands of people called the author trying to understand its meaning. |
Comic book death | Comic book characters have a tendency to rarely, if ever, stay dead. |
"Dennō Senshi Porygon" | An episode of the "harmless" Pokémon cartoon that caused seizures in almost 700 children. |
Der Fuehrer's Face | Donald Duck won an Oscar as a Hitler-saluting Nazi. |
Ebola-chan | Fictional personification of the Ebola virus promoted with racist intentions. |
Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure | A short pornographic cartoon from the 1920s about a man with an oversized, sentient detachable penis. |
Foreskin Man | Introducing Foreskin man, the superhero who wants to end the practice of circumcision. |
Gorillas in comics | A curious abundance of gorillas in comic book plots during the Silver Age of Comics. |
Homosexuality in the Batman franchise | Do Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson do more together than fighting crime? |
ISIS-chan | Created by Japanese internet users to purposely offset search results for... the actual thing it was referencing. |
Jenny Everywhere | An open-source webcomic character. |
Kuso Miso Technique | A homoerotic, scatological manga that ended up becoming an online meme. |
Manga Bible | And the Lord said unto John, "Omae wa mō shinde iru". |
The Metric Marvels | As part of the 1970's campaign to encourage use of the metric system in the U.S, the creators of Schoolhouse Rock! produced these shorts to teach children about liters, meters, and most things in between. |
Moe anthropomorphism | Even a washing machine can be the girl of your dreams. |
Mr. Immortal | A Marvel Comics superhero with no special powers except immortality, who has been killed in ways including crushing, burning, self-impalement on giant novelty scissors, bear trap, cannon, chainsaw, piranhas, ferrets, spear, python, and alcohol poisoning (three times). Prone to fits of rage upon returning to life. |
NFL SuperPro | A comic book series about a super American football player, perhaps taking Super Bowl too far. |
Pinky & Pepper Forever | A short furry graphic novel dealing with themes such as Catholicism, lesbianism, relationship struggles, BDSM, suicide, and the afterlife, expressed through characters from a short-lived line of fashion dolls. |
Pokémon episodes removed from rotation | Episodes of the Pokémon TV show that, for one reason or another, were never re-ran, skipped over in international dubs, or just never aired at all. |
Popetown | Due to complaints by Catholics, this animated series' original broadcaster BBC Three never showed it at all. |
Squirrel and Hedgehog | The height of the North Korean animation industry. A tale of talking animals as an allegory for the North Korean version of history, featuring Americans depicted as laser-eyed wolves. |
Syaoran Li![]() Syaoran (Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, original) |
What happens on Wikipedia when a group of manga artists take a character from one of their earlier works and perform several cross-references and plot twists. |
Tentacle erotica | Human-cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai. |
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Chinese propaganda anime based on the life of Karl Marx. |
Tiger Mask donation phenomenon | The other time manga's most famous pro wrestler entered the real world. |
Truck-kun | The character responsible for sending more protagonists to other worlds than any other. |
Literature
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of the silv'ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember'd for a very long time."
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*** | The story of a man who creates ***s out of raws. It is never explained what "***" nor "raw" means. |
1601 | A quite risqué squib telling a conversation between Queen Elizabeth I and various famous 16th century writers fully on scatological topics, described as "the most famous piece of pornography in American literature". Notably written by Mark Twain. |
112 Gripes About the French | A handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French. |
A True Story | An Ancient Greek parody of tall tales that were told as true in ancient sources, that contains the first literary references to space travel and fighting wars against aliens. The story ends with "the biggest lie of all" - a promise of future sequels. |
A Void | An entire novel written without using the letter e. See also Gadsby below. |
Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos | Published in 1825 as a Victorian children's book and described as "a round game for merry parties", the object of the game was to quickly recite alphabetical tongue-twisting mock-Latin gibberish. |
Alien space bats | An implausible divergence from the real world, used as a plot device in alternate history. |
Anthropodermic bibliopegy | The practice of binding books in human skin. |
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Your helpful NASA guide on talking to aliens. |
Atlanta Nights | A group of science fiction authors get together and deliberately write an absolutely horrible novel to fool and embarrass a "vanity publisher". |
Bad Sex in Fiction Award | Created to draw attention to the worst-of-the-worst in describing sex. |
The Beginning Was the End | A piece of racist pseudoscience written by a self-proclaimed psychic, that posits man devolved from a species of intelligent cannibalistic apes. Would be completely obscure if not for Devo. |
Betteridge's law of headlines | Why, when a newspaper asks a yes-no question, the answer is usually "no". |
Big Dumb Object | Objects in science fiction literature and media that are specifically created to be interesting. Too bad they'll probably be overlooked with a name like this... |
The Book of Heroic Failures | A book which glorifies failure. Started off by The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. The book was a success and thus declared a "failure as a failure". |
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Who can forget such classics as Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships or Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts? |
La Bougie du Sapeur | A French newspaper published every February 29th. |
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest | A contest to find the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. |
Cain's Jawbone | A murder mystery puzzle book that only three people have solved since it was published in 1934. |
Catullus 16 | An explicit ancient Roman poem whose opening line has been described as "one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin". |
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Have you ever been in need of an easy-to-follow bomb manual? Well, now you have it. |
Codex Seraphinianus | An illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, written in an imaginary language. |
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater | This highly popular autobiographical account about the effects of laudanum led several English authors to opium use. |
Henry Darger | Writer of a 15,000-page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who rarely left his small room. His word was worth millions a few years after his death. |
Dinosaur erotica | Have you ever been Taken by a T-Rex or Ravished by a Triceratops? |
Death poem | The urge to have famous last words, taken to its logical, carefully rewritten extreme. |
Empty book | A literal example of why you should not judge a book by its cover. |
English as She Is Spoke | A 19th-century Portuguese–English conversational guide and phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour since it was apparently the product of translating a Portuguese–French phrase book by non-English-speaking Portuguese with the help of a French–English phrase book. |
English-language editions of The Hobbit | Now collectors' items because of their printing differences. |
Evil laughter | "Mua-ha-haha-ha-haaa" and the like. |
The Eye of Argon | An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella, written in 1970 by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then. |
Fallout: Equestria | A five volume, 620,000-word long crossover fanfiction of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the post-apocalyptic Fallout video game franchise. |
Fart Proudly | An essay written by Benjamin Franklin about flatulence. |
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women | A 1558 diatribe by John Knox against Mary, Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor. |
Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley | A non-existent book by a non-existent author, created for a Yellow Pages UK ad, and made real eight years later. |
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn" | Supposedly the shortest story possible in the English language, though Ernest Hemingway had nothing to do with it. |
Future Library project | Project that collects an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114. The works will remain unread and unpublished until 2114; one thousand trees were specially planted for the project; the 100 manuscripts will be printed using paper made from the trees. |
Gadsby | A 50,110-word long book famous for not using the letter "e". |
Grammarians' War | At the start of the 16th century, British schoolmasters were insulting one another. In Latin, of course. |
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Textbook on rationality disguised as a Harry Potter fanfiction. |
Hawking Index | Are you one of the 1.9% to have read Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices from cover-to-cover? |
Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed | The perfect picture book for your little conservative. |
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A sensational discovery in 1983, which turned out to be an elaborate hoax. |
Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles | An evangelical Christian version of the Harry Potter series, featuring creationism, anti-Catholicism, and Biblical references that assume you have a Bible handy. Maybe written by a traditionalist wife and mother for her children, maybe a hoax - who knows? |
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming | No, this isn't about the murder of a Disney character. This is the memoir of the man responsible for declassifying Pluto. |
Hundred Thousand Billion Poems | Raymond Queneau's 1961 book consisting of ten sonnets printed on card with each line on a separate strip. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, allowing for 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. |
I Am a Cat | A novel written from the perspective of a cat. |
I Am God | A novel in which God is made to keep a diary to chronicle his love for an atheist. |
I, Libertine | A non-existent novel that was the subject of a hoax intended to criticize the manner in which best-seller lists are determined. |
If Israel Lost the War | A very soft alternate history romance. |
The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs | A 2010 book, divided into 10 editions, entirely about Wikipedia changes made on page about the Iraq War (2003-2011) when the US was still involved in the confrontation. |
Jennifer Mills News | A weekly newspaper written by, and about, herself since 2002. |
The Jungle | A 1906 book that secretly exposed the dark side of meat factories from that time, eventually resulting in the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and later, by extension, the FDA. |
Lajja | How this 1993 novel was the primary reason for the exile of its author overseas. |
Lecherous Limericks | Dirty limericks by Isaac Asimov. |
Lesbian vampire | They don't bite...necks. |
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" | A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be read and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones. |
Lobby Lud | "You are ____ and I claim my five pounds". |
Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon | A fictional dish with a quite long name. |
Magical Negro | An outdated stock character who helps out white protagonists. |
Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship | A theory which states that Christopher Marlowe's unnatural death was a hoax and that he continued to write and publish under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare". |
William McGonagall | A writer widely held to be the worst poet in the English language. |
Men in Aida | A homoerotic homophonic translation of Homer: "Men in Aida, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles." |
The Meaning of Hitler | Sir Max Hastings called it 'among the best' studies of Hitler. |
Yukio Mishima | A nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature who is perhaps more notorious for attempting an ultranationalist coup d'etat against the Japanese government, despite only being supported by four other people. After this inevitably failed, he committed seppuku, and speculation as to his true psychological motives has raged ever since. |
Mock Turtle | The weirdest, and least recorded, character in Alice in Wonderland. |
My Immortal | A legendarily terrible piece of Harry Potter fan fiction that awkwardly inserted vampires, time travel, and emo/"goff" subcultures into J.K. Rowling's wizarding world. Someone who may have been the author of the piece almost got a major publishing deal for her memoirs. |
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Not literally; this autobiography about one of the Simpsons's voice actors was once performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2004, by the author herself. |
Naked Came the Stranger | Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller. Later the basis of a porn film starring Darby Lloyd Rains. |
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 | A hoax biography written about a fictional artist, written as part of an elaborate prank pulled on art critics. |
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats | Cat poems by T. S. Eliot. |
Order of the Occult Hand | "It was as if an occult hand had edited this Wikipedia article." |
On Bullshit | A very serious essay by Harry Frankfurt sketching a philosophical theory of, well, bullshit. |
Ossian | "The greatest poet that has ever existed", according to Jefferson. But he didn't. |
P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever | "M" is for... mnemonic? "B" is for bdellium? What? |
Philip M. Parker | Writer of The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India and thousands of other works... by means of a computer program. |
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones | Without questions one of finnest Pieces of wrriten text in the English language. |
Pinocchio paradox | What if Pinocchio said his nose will grow? |
Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | Understanding the political context of the mid-to-late 1890s in the United States will give you a different understanding of the gold, silver and emerald symbolism, among other things. |
Print Wikipedia | Yes, it does exist. |
Project Mars: A Technical Tale | A sci-fi book about Mars exploration and the Martians led by "the Elon", written by NASA's chief rocketer Wernher von Braun in 1949. |
Rangila Rasul | How this religious satire made a massive controversy between India's Muslim and Hindu communities, and helped change the nation's legal system. |
Rejecting Jane | Turns out publishers really don't know anything about literature. |
Rolling Stone (Uganda) | The Ugandan version isn't a music magazine, but instead tries to out gay men and get them killed. |
Amanda McKittrick Ros | The McGonagall of prose. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis competed as to who could read her longest without laughing. |
Saddam Hussein's novels | Crimes against literature? |
The Satanic Verses | An infamous fictional play that to this day endangers the life of the Author and The translators due to religious fanatics. |
Shakespeare apocrypha | Anti-Stratfordians (see "Shakespeare authorship question" below) can take heart that there really are works attributed to Shakespeare that weren't written by him! |
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A great conspiracy that concealed the identity of the true author of "Shakespeare's" works, implying that all contemporary references to Shakespeare's authorship were fraudulent or mistaken. |
Society of Science, Letters and Art | 19th century bogus literary society which duped learned (and would-be learned) people into purchasing the right to the society's academic dress and letters after their name. |
Peter Sotos | A writer and musician who explores serial killer and pedophile lore, while simultaneously praising them in his work. For one of his magazine covers, he used an image taken from real child pornography, which he plead guilty to possessing. |
Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn | Angus McDiarmad, a native Scots-Gaelic speaker, writes a book on a Scottish Highland area with the help of an English dictionary to great comic effect and is termed "the world's worst author". |
The Tale of Two Lovers | A 15th century erotic novel written by a future pope. |
There once was a man from Nantucket... | A gratifying theme for limericks; some of them obscene. |
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Turns out time travel is embedded into The Lord of the Rings in several different ways. |
Chuck Tingle | A monster erotica writer whose stories feature sexual encounters with almost anything you can imagine, ranging from a sentient jet plane to the concept of time. Also a master of taekwondo (allegedly) and is always seen wearing a pink sack on his head. |
Le Train de Nulle Part | A French novel, 233 pages long, written without verbs. |
The Unfortunates | A book whose chapters you can read in pretty much any order. |
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Not everybody was happy to see the first man on the Moon. |
Winnie ille Pu | Winnie-the-Pooh in Latin that became a bestseller. |
Wonders of the East | An Old English text from a millennium ago, all about the various creatures that can supposedly be found in Asia. These apparently include dragons, giant ants, hens which burn people, human-donkey hybrids and humans with fan-like ears that cover their entire bodies. |
Music
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27 Club | A number of prominent musicians have died at this age, though statisticians attribute the "club" to apophenia – seeing patterns in random data. See also the related white lighter myth. |
Animutation | The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a Flash video to go along with it. |
Avril Lavigne replacement conspiracy theory | The "Paul is dead" (see below) of the millennial generation, with Melissa Vandella playing the role of Billy Shears. |
Bouncing ball | That thing in music videos that helps you sing along to the lyrics. It dates back to 1924. |
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A music journalist's meme from the 1960s that arguably destroyed the career of the Beach Boys' main songwriter and producer. (Within three years, Wilson was working as a grocery store cashier.) |
Characters in Devo music videos | Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Wikipedia! |
"Clapton is God" | Graffiti that's famous for a photo of a dog urinating on it. |
Clear Channel memorandum | America banning "Learn to Fly" by Foo Fighters from radio airplay after 9/11 is an odd choice. Though "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong brings to mind more questions. |
Curse of the ninth | The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony. |
The Dark Side of the Rainbow | What happens when you mix Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz? |
Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident | The band's tour bus dumped 800 pounds of sewage on a passenger boat. Funnily enough, the opener of that night's concert was "Don't Drink the Water"... |
Earworm | It's got a hook in you. |
Elvis impersonator | People pretend to be Elvis Presley and only him. |
Elvis sightings | There are many who still believe. |
Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. | That time John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself. |
Fyre Festival | The organizers spent so much money promoting the event that they ran out of money to spend on the actual event. They were later faced with eight lawsuits. |
Industrial musical | Musicals about a business, intended to be seen by the business' employees to improve loyalty and motivation. |
Jazz ambassadors | Subliminal American values delivered through smooth jams. |
Lebenslaute | Open air classical music performances as a form of political protest. |
List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response | Concerts which didn't work out quite as well as hoped. |
Literal music video | What happens when you replace the lyrics in a music video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the music video? Hilarity ensues. |
Loudness war | Why recorded music is getting "louder" over time. |
Manualism | The little-known art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands. |
Marilyn Manson–Columbine High School massacre controversy | News media falsely accused Marilyn Manson and his band of the same name for influencing two mass shooters who actually hated his music. |
Metal Open Air | Intended as Brazil's version of Wacken Open Air, it instead became their version of Fyre Festival. |
Millennial whoop | Put on a "best of the 2010s" playlist, and hear the same repeated two notes everywhere. |
"More Cowbell" | I got a fever, and the only prescription... is more cowbell! |
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A remark that later proved deadly for John Lennon. |
Mozart and scatology | Mozart was fond of toilet humour, his letters to friends and family often contained scatological passages. He even wrote music dedicated to scatology, which was shared among a closed group of most likely inebriated friends, the most infamous of which is Leck mich im Arsch (literally "Lick me in the arse"). |
Musikalisches Würfelspiel | A system written by Mozart in which the musical piece is decided randomly by playing dice. |
"My Way" killings | You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra's signature tune in the Philippines. |
P-Funk mythology | The whimsical universe surrounding the P Funk all stars. |
"Paul is dead" | Was Paul McCartney replaced by a lookalike in the 1960s? |
Pink Floyd pigs | The band's recurring props and references. |
PopMart Tour | Take an unfinished studio album, hold a press conference at Kmart, and put on a show in countries around the world, complete with a spinning mirrorball lemon, a giant martini olive, a large golden arch, and the largest video screen ever toured. That would be U2's 1997–98 tour in a nutshell. |
Publius Enigma | A mystery wrapped in an enigma related to Pink Floyd, which has remained unsolved since it appeared on Usenet in 1994. |
Operation Nifty Package | How do you get a dictator out of an embassy? With music, of course! |
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What happens when pop music fans take themselves way too seriously? Actually, nothing fun. |
Unusual types of gramophone records | From changing speeds, to endlessly-looping locked grooves, to... Bhutanese postage stamps? |
"Up to eleven" | This article is one louder. |
Uruguayan Invasion | Just as British bands were crossing the pond, Uruguayan bands were crossing the Uruguay River to Argentina. |
Vestal Masturbation T-shirt | A shirt released by the British heavy metal band Cradle of Filth depicting a masturbating nun on the front and calls Jesus Christ a cunt on the back. Multiple people have been arrested for wearing it out in public. |
Whamageddon | A festive music challenge where you have to avoid listening to a certain Christmas song throughout the Christmas period. Perfect if you're not a fan of George Michael. |
Instruments
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Blackbird | A playable violin made out of black stone. |
Cat organ | A keyboard instrument in which the keys cause cats to meow. |
Electroencephalophone | A musical instrument controlled by brainwaves. |
Escopetarra | The guitAR-15 of Colombia. |
Great Stalacpipe Organ | Made in a cave using stalactites and a lot of patience and ingenuity. |
Musical saw | The least favourite instrument of Ronnie Wood, the Hollies and the Screaming Trees. |
Piganino | Like a harpsichord, but instead of plucking strings, you're poking pigs. May not have existed, but inspired some good music anyway. |
Ugly stick | An instrument in Newfoundland, an insult everywhere else. |
Viola jokes | You can tell if a viola player is playing out of tune if you can see the bow moving. |
Genres
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Biomusic | Music made by non-humans. |
Chap hop | Rap music about being English in the 19th-century. |
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The term was invented to make fun of music journalists and bloggers who hype "the next big thing". Ironically, they then wrote about chillwave as "the next big thing". |
Christian ska | Apparently, not even God himself can resist the raw power of ska. |
Danger music | The name is very much literal, music that tries to harm the listener or performer. |
Early Norwegian black metal scene | More church arsons per capita than any other known music scene! |
Gothabilly | What if Buddy Holly was goth? |
Grunge speak | That time a receptionist convinced The New York Times that "wack slacks" was slang for ripped jeans and "lamestain" meant an uncool person. |
Jihadism and hip hop | Straight outta ISIS. |
Kawaii metal | The cutest metal subgenre. |
Lowercase | A genre of ultra-minimalist music that is known for deliberately utilizing silence to contrast with mundane field recordings which have been amplified in volume. |
Pirate metal | Heavy metal music combined with pirate mythology and jargon. |
Proibidão | As part of a crackdown on drug cartels in Rio de Janeiro, this uniquely Brazilian form of gangsta rap cannot legally be performed or broadcast on the radio. |
Unblack metal | Black metal, but Christian. |
Yu-Mex | Mexican music... from Yugoslavia. |
Composers, musicians, and performers
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AKB48 Group | Girl group or franchise? Same with her "official" rival group and "spin-off" group as well! |
ArnoCorps Austrian Death Machine |
A pair of bands who perform songs solely based on Arnold Schwarzenegger films. |
Y. Bhekhirst | A mysterious man with an implaceable accent hands over copies of his self-recorded cassette to random New York record stores in the 80s/90s, which contain a selection of strange, barely comprehensible songs set against sparse, repetitive instrumentation, later spawning a cult following among outsider music enthusiasts and a decades-long mystery. |
Bis Kaidan | What happens when noise music meets J-pop? |
Boston Typewriter Orchestra | Ah, the beautiful sound of... typewriters. |
Rosemary Brown | A spiritualist who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. |
Buckethead | A virtuoso electric guitarist known for always wearing a white mask and a KFC bucket on his head while performing and releasing over 300 albums over the course of over 30 years. |
Bull of Heaven | A group that is known for their extremely long albums. Most known for 210: Like a Wall in Which An Insect Lives and Gnaws at a runtime of 5.7 years; their longest album is 310: ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k at 3.343 quindecillion years long. |
GG Allin | A punk-rocker who would attack people attending his concerts, consisting of hoarse, disheveled vocals. He would also take an excessive amount of drugs, strip naked, and defecate on stage. |
CD Rev | Because nothing says gangsta like being funded by a corrupt communist government. |
Death in June | Not many other anti-fascist music groups can claim to be so blanketed with fascist imagery, even down to the name. |
Eva Braun | A rock band from Serbia. |
Damião Experiença | An eccentric Brazilian singer-songwriter, known for being a reclusive hoarder and singing in his own made-up dialect of Portuguese (which he claimed was spoken on his "home planet"), often about self-contradictory and pro-authoritarian political themes and popular culture. |
Matt Farley | A songwriter who has released thousands of songs under at least seventy pseudonyms such as "Papa Razzi and the Photogs", "The Hungry Food Band", and "The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee". |
The Gerogerigegege | A very special music project that released the sound of a man defecating and a record commemorating the deceased Japanese emperor with the sound of people having sex to the national anthem, and had a member who just masturbated on stage. |
Half Man Half Biscuit | Have you ever listened to "Man of Constant Sorrow (With a Garage in Constant Use)" from the album No-One Cares About Your Creative Hub So Get Your Fuckin' Hedge Cut? |
Hanatarash | The Japanese noise band that drove a bulldozer into their concert venue. |
Hatebeak | The thing that should not beak. |
Hatari | A band that entered the 2019 Söngvakeppnin (Iceland's Eurovision Song Contest selection competition) as a joke, only to win first place. The band then finished third in Eurovision's semi-finals, advancing to the Grand Final and finishing 10th place there. |
Joyce Hatto | A pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public. |
Bobby Jameson | A hippie singer-songwriter outcast who never received financial compensation for his songs and records. Thought to be dead after the 1960s, but then resurfaced with a blog in 2007 aiming to set the record straight about his life story. |
Jandek | A prolific and pseudonymous singer/songwriter active since 1978 who only grants the occasional interview and has never provided any biographical information. |
Florence Foster Jenkins | An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof. |
Kevin MacLeod | Perhaps the most heard musician on the whole internet. |
Klaus Nomi | Countertenor with an unusually wide vocal range, whose style of dress was commonly referred to as "alien-like" and enjoyed recording new wave covers of 1950s pop. |
The KLF | An electronic band that became mainstream chart-toppers while undertaking confrontational Situationist-influenced performance stunts, culminating in them performing at the nationally-televised 1992 BRIT Awards with a grindcore band while firing machine gun blanks into the audience, dumping a dead sheep at the afterparty, and then disbanding. |
Kunt and the Gang | If you think his name is a bit rude, you should hear his songs such as "Use My Arsehole as a Cunt", "I'm Wanking over a Pornographic Polaroid of an Ex-Girlfriend Who Died" and "Jesus Died of a Stranglewank". Then there was the one about his paperboy... See also: "Boris Johnson is a Fucking Cunt". |
LadBaby | A British YouTuber who had five Christmas number ones in the UK in a row between 2018 and 2022, all of them being sausage roll-themed parodies of well-known songs. Strongly disliked by Kunt and the Gang (see above). |
Laibach | A Slovenian industrial band known for combining totalitarian aesthetics with pop culture, including martial covers of the Beatles and Queen. Also known as the first Western band to perform in North Korea. |
Merzbow | A Japanese experimental music project whose most popular album has been affectionately described as "What a bug hears when it's being flushed down the toilet" and "Directly looking at the sun with your ears". |
Moondog | A blind composer, theoretician, poet, and inventor of musical instruments who dressed like a viking and lived as a street musician in New York between the 1940s and 1970s. |
MP4 | Rock music and Members of Parliament do mix. |
Okilly Dokilly | A band that performs metalcore songs about the character Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, while dressed as the character as well. |
One Pound Fish Man | A man who works at a market who saw his sales patter go viral and challenge the X Factor for the Christmas number one single in 2012. |
Panchiko | A group of British teenagers form a band and record a demo CD-R which is quickly forgotten about. Around fifteen years later, someone discovers a corrupted copy in a charity shop, and it becomes an online phenomenon. |
Eilert Pilarm | The Elvis impersonator who looks and sounds nothing like Elvis, according to Alfo Media. |
Charles Manson discography | Wait, whose discography?? |
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A one-man band who has self-released over 400 albums through his home-based mailing service since 1982. Later noted as a pioneer of DIY music and indie rock. |
Portsmouth Sinfonia | An orchestra made up entirely of people with no experience in playing their respective assigned instruments. |
Les Rallizes Dénudés | A pioneering Japanese experimental rock band, known for releasing virtually no studio material despite being active for around 30 years, their reclusive founder refusing nearly all interviews and media coverage, while nevertheless going on to be highly influential among Japan's avant-garde underground. This may or may not have been due to the fact the original bassist was involved in hijacking a domestic air flight, redirecting it towards North Korea. |
The Residents | A long-running avant-garde music collective that perform wearing eyeball helmets and disguises, successfully maintaining their anonymity for around 50 years. One early rumor was that they were actually the Beatles. |
Rockbitch | An all-female pagan rock band who were notorious for performing live sex acts on stage. |
Mamoru Samuragochi | A "deaf composer" who wasn't deaf and didn't compose anything. |
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None of this band's members really wanted to form a band, nor did they really have any musical talent, but hey, a fortune teller predicted success, so off they went... |
Thai Elephant Orchestra | An orchestra of elephants playing specially-designed instruments. |
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An (extremely) Australian rock band whose members are anonymous, perform wearing balaclavas and use pseudonyms like "Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun" and "Ron Hitler-Barassi". Known for their confrontational dark comedy, their song titles include "Defecate on My Face", "I Might Be A Cunt, But I'm Not A Fucking Cunt", "Martin Scorsese Is Really Quite A Jovial Fellow", "What Nationality Is Les Murray?", "Whatareya? (You're a Yob or You're a Wanker)" and "Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me". |
Tonetta | A reclusive divorced man who gained a cult following in his sixties after posting videos to YouTube of his own lo-fi, independently made songs, often with sexually explicit lyrics coupled with footage of himself cross-dressing. |
Tout-à-Coup Jazz | A Burkinabé jazz band from the 1970s whose membership included two future leaders of the country: coincidentally, both the victim and perpetrator of the same coup d'état. |
The Vegetable Orchestra | An Austrian orchestra whose musical instruments are made solely from vegetables. |
Viper | Has released over 1,927 albums, though a majority contain recycled material. Titles of his work include You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack and Kill Urself My Man. Arrested in 2024 for allegedly holding a woman captive in his garage in Houston for five years. |
The Wealdstone Raider | A supporter of English non-league football team Wealdstone whose retorts towards rival supporters went viral and saw him challenging for the Christmas number one spot in 2014. |
Wesley Willis | A musician and visual artist who recorded songs about topics such as his home town of Chicago, his schizophrenia, violent confrontations with cartoon superheroes, and bestiality, was fond of headbutting fans, and often ended his songs with "Rock over London, rock on, Chicago" followed by a product slogan. |
Gary Wilson | An experimental musician who sings about stalking girls and plays with duct tape, fake blood, powder, and mannequins when on stage. |
Wild Man Fischer | A schizophrenic Los Angeles street entertainer whose big break was recording an album with Frank Zappa. Their collaborations ended when Fischer, in a violent rage, threw a bottle that nearly hit Zappa's daughter Moon. |
Ya Ho Wha 13 | A cult psych rock band... literally. |
The Zimmers | A rock band made up of elderly musicians. As of 2017[update], the oldest member had lived to 101. |
The Zombeatles | Paul is undead. |
Musical works
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A Musical Joke | A composition that Mozart allegedly made to mock bad composers. |
As Slow as Possible | A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until 2640. |
"Carnival of Light" | The Holy Grail for Beatles fans: an 11-minute recording of the Fab Four aimlessly bashing their instruments and shouting gibberish. |
Cat fugue | A piece for harpsichord allegedly inspired by the sounds the composer's cat produced by walking along the instruments keyboard. |
Duetto buffo di due gatti | A duet in which two sopranos repeatedly meow at each other. |
Grosse Fuge | A composition written by Ludwig van Beethoven which was universally put down at the time as being "incomprehensible", now accepted as one of his greatest works. |
Helikopter-Streichquartett | A string quartet composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen that must be played in four circling helicopters, the sound remixed, chopper sounds and all, for an audience on the ground. |
Homage to Hans Keller | A piece for four tubas by Anthony Burgess written immediately after Keller reviewed the operetta Blooms of Dublin as a "pathetic pastiche". It was described as "a kind of lavatorial blast" in a review. |
I Am Sitting in a Room | A piece in which the composer recites and records a brief explanation of the work, plays back and records the echo of the recording, then records the echo of the echo of the recording, and so on until it is transformed into a completely unrecognizable sound. |
"Leck mich im Arsch" "Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber" "Difficile lectu" |
Three canons by Mozart about... "licking him in the arse". |
List of musical works in unusual time signatures | What's the most absurd time signature you can imagine? 1/12? ⅔/2? How about 32⁄2/4? |
List of silent musical compositions | Not to be confused with "The Sound of Silence", these tunes don't have really much to hear. Among them is one of the most famous classical compositions of the 20th century. |
List of music considered the worst | We built this city on not being very good. |
Marinka (operetta) | An operetta in which a group of American teenagers watch a film about and then discuss the Mayerling incident, the murder-suicide pact that indirectly led to World War I. However, this version of the story has a happy ending. |
Rage Over a Lost Penny | An audience favorite from Beethoven's oeuvre. It's gleefully angry, but the maestro left it unfinished. |
Songs
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"The Anacreontic Song" | An 18th-century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for "The Star-Spangled Banner". |
"All Summer Long" | A song where two karaoke cover versions became one-hit wonders in 2008 on the Billboard Hot 100 because the original song was not released on iTunes, only to radio. One of the covers even charted a few places higher than the original. |
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A foul-mouthed comedy punk song about the British Prime Minister that attempted to be the UK Christmas number one in 2020. Despite getting no air time, it got to No. 5. The following year, it spawned a sequel, which also got to No. 5 in the Christmas chart. From the same band that brought you "Prince Andrew Is a Sweaty Nonce" and "Fuck the Tories". See also: Kunt and the Gang. |
"Camouflage" | A vinyl single from 1983 that contained a computer programme for the song's own music video for the ZX81. Created by a man who later found fame wearing a papier-mâché head. |
"Chocolate Salty Balls" | A 1998 song from South Park, which got to the top 10 in several countries' charts, including number one in the UK, but it isn't actually about food. |
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A novelty dance one-hit wonder rap song from the Simpsons in 1990, whose backing vocals were done by none other than Michael Jackson. |
"Eat Your Salad" | The Latvian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. The lyrics speak of "eating veggies and p*ssy", along with numerous other sexual innuendos. Somehow, the song still has a serious message. |
"E depois do adeus" | The Portuguese Entry of the Eurovision Song Contest 1974 was used as a signal to launch a successful national coup d'état. |
"Euro-Vision" | The Belgian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest 1980 whose lyrics spoke precisely of the event in which they took part, and deliberately attempted to be last-place. |
"Five Per Cent for Nothing" | A very short instrumental by a band noted for very long songs that was retitled as a parting shot at their former manager, who sued them afterwards. |
"Flappie" | A Dutch Christmas song about cannibalism. |
"The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)" | A 2013 song "created to fail" by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis that instead ended up becoming a global smash hit. |
"Give That Wolf a Banana" | A song that combines Little Red Riding Hood and two crazy 4.5 billion year old yellow wolves called Keith and Jim. The meaning of the song is debated, but one common theory is of all things, vaccines. It's also a Eurovision song, to boot. |
"Gloomy Sunday" | A Hungarian dirge from the 1930s that the press of the time claimed was linked to over 100 suicides, earning it the moniker of the "Hungarian Suicide Song". |
"Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" | Was der Führer only half a man? See also Possible monorchism of Adolf Hitler. |
"Jeg har set en rigtig negermand" | A Danish #1 single from 1970, extolling the virtues of racial equality while calling a "negro man" "black as a bucket of tar". |
"Jiggle Jiggle" | That time when an autotuned interview with Louis Theroux became so popular they convinced him to do a song. |
"Justice for All" | A surreal choral/spoken-word... thing recorded by Donald Trump and 20 men in prison for attacking the Capitol on January 6. |
"Lemon Incest" | Fun for the whole family!.....NOT! |
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Poopy-di scoop. Scoop-diddy-whoop. Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop. |
Lostwave | Unknown songs, lost to time. |
"The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" | The name says it all. (Well, almost.) |
"The Most Unwanted Song" | Featuring operatic rapping, a children's choir urging listeners to go to Walmart, bagpipes, cowboy music, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn. |
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The Beach Boys' collaboration with Charles Manson. (Yes, that Charles Manson.) |
"Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah" | If you can see someone's underwear, here's the tune to tell them by. |
"Planet of the Bass" | The 2023 affectionate parody of 1990s Europop that became a hit in its own right. |
"Poison: Iitai Koto mo Ienai Konna Yo no Naka wa" | A random Japanese rock song that gained popularity due to its ability to calm crying babies. |
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" | The song where the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent. |
"Ram Ranch" | A spoken-word heavy metal song about a gay cowboy orgy that became an internet meme and a counter-protest song against the Canadian convoy protest. |
"Ready 'n' Steady" | A song mentioned in a top songs list of a notable magazine, that was long-believed by some to be non-existent because collectors were unable to find a recording or further information on it until 33 years after it was written. |
"Rocket Queen" | If you want to hear the sound of a woman having sex with Axl Rose set to music, now's your chance! |
"Shukusei!! Loli Kami Requiem" | Touch her, you'll be arrested. |
"Supermarioland" | Rapping set to the theme of Super Mario Land. After hearing the song, Nintendo not only cleared the sample but also requested they make an album of Super Mario material. |
"Suzukake no Ki no Michi de 'Kimi no Hohoemi o Yume ni Miru' to Itte Shimattara Bokutachi no Kankei wa Dō Kawatte Shimau no ka, Bokunari ni Nannichi ka Kangaeta Ue de no Yaya Kihazukashii Ketsuron no Yō na Mono" | Apparently AKB48's producers couldn't come up with a snappier title. |
"Teletubbies say "Eh-oh!"" | A novelty nursery-rhyme remix of the Teletubbies theme tune that got to number one in the United Kingdom, and was narrowly beaten for Christmas number one in 1997. This did not stop Bob the Builder from getting Christmas number one three years later, although. |
"Tetris" | A Eurodance version of the Tetris theme co-produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was in the British charts at the same time as "Supermarioland" mentioned above. |
"Timothy" | A top 40 hit in 1970, written by Rupert Holmes of "The Piña Colada Song" fame, that gained success despite (or due to) the fact it was about cannibalism during a mining disaster. |
"To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap)" | A comic rap performed by Mel Brooks, sung as Adolf Hitler. "Don't be stupid, be a smarty. Come and join the Nazi Party". |
"To Me, To You (Bruv)" | An unexpected collaboration between rapper Tinchy Stryder and British comedy duo the Chuckle Brothers. |
"Ulterior Motives (song)" | A lostwave song which mysteriously surfaced on the Internet in 2021 on a little-known song finding website, which went viral in 2023 when a group of Redditors tried to find the origin of it; it was later found in an obscure porn film from 1986 the year after. |
"United Breaks Guitars" | A protest song against United Airlines which caused their stock price to fall by 10% and cost shareholders $180 million. |
"We Didn't Start the Fire" | A song covering the major events of 40 years. Check Events mentioned for explanations of each. |
"Wear Sunscreen" | A newspaper column of a hypothetical commencement speech, which prominently mentions the benefits of sunscreen, which Baz Luhrmann mashed up a recording of it with a dance track, creating the successful song 'Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)'. |
"You Suffer" | At a full 1.316 seconds in length, the shortest song with a physical single release of all time. |
"You're Pitiful" | The true story of how a Weird Al Yankovic parody caused the article for Atlantic Records to be regularly vandalized. |
Albums
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( ) | An album by Icelandic band Sigur Rós featuring songs in an entirely made-up language. |
21½ Minutes in Berlin/23 Minutes in Brussels | A pair of live recordings by the band Suicide, with the B-side showing an audience grow increasingly agitated at Elvis Costello not performing, before devolving into a riot. |
A Rubber Band Christmas | An album of Christmas music created using office supplies. |
Altered States of America | This grindcore album by Agoraphobic Nosebleed has 100 tracks, including many under 15 seconds in length. It even has a track 0! |
Amore | A Japan-exclusive city pop album from the granddaughter of former Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. |
All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling | An early album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which had such a tiny release it was considered lost until a 2022 release. |
The Boy Bands Have Won | Actually, this album's full title is "The Boy Bands Have Won" followed by a further 151 words. As of August 2009, it holds the record for the longest album title. |
Christmas in the Stars | Jon Bon Jovi's recorded music debut was for a Star Wars-themed holiday album. |
Cigarettes and Valentines | An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen. This led to the creation of American Idiot. |
Dark Night of the Soul | Due to a legal dispute, this album was released with a blank CD-R. |
Elvis' Greatest Shit | Not the one he was trying to pass the night he allegedly died. |
Embrace (American band Embrace album) Embrace (English band Embrace album) |
What happens to Wikipedia article titles when two different bands with the exact same name both release self-titled albums. |
Eurobeat Disney | A Japan-exclusive album of eurobeat remixes to Disney songs. |
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A 61⁄2 hour concept album series portraying the stages of mental deterioration caused by Alzheimer's disease. Sounds obscure? It became popular in the most unexpected of places. |
Everyday Chemistry | A supposed album by the Beatles, from an alternate dimension where they never broke up. |
The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks | The title of this album led to obscenity charges. |
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An official Elvis Presley live album that has no music, instead consisting of random on-stage banter and comments from between songs stripped of any coherence or context. |
Helter Stupid | Negativland fabricated a moral panic claiming that their music had inspired a teenager to murder his family, and then created a sound collage album based on samples of media reporting on the story to make fun of them for falling for it. |
In Search of The | A box set isn't particularly unusual. A box set of 13 full albums that have never been released before, handmade by the artist, is pretty unusual. |
The Lillywhite Sessions | Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band. |
Meow the Jewels | Mew mrrp meow purr mrrp. |
Metal Machine Music | A 1975 album by Lou Reed that consists of 64 minutes of audio feedback, widely believed to have either been an elaborate joke, or an attempt by Reed to escape from a record label contract. |
The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief | A three-sided LP. |
Mouth Sounds | In which Modest Mouse, Alanis Morrisette, and Huey Lewis and the News are mixed with "All Star". ASMR lovers avoid, Shrek lovers welcome. |
Musique pour Supermarché | This album by Jean-Michel Jarre had only a single copy produced, which was then auctioned off like a painting. The master tapes were subsequently destroyed, making the copy unique. |
No Love Deep Web | To protest the album being delayed without their consent, the band leaked it online early while using a photo of the drummer's penis as cover art. |
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin | A Wu-Tang Clan album that only had one copy produced, being bought by Martin Shkreli for two million dollars, making it the most expensive work of music ever sold. |
Orgasm | How a bunch of tripped-out hippies in 1969 decided to invite random people from the streets of New York to contribute to their experimental album, and in the process ended up inventing industrial music, noise rock and perhaps even black metal decades ahead of schedule. |
The Road to Freedom | A "spectacular hit album" of... Scientology songs? |
Sleep | An 81⁄2 hour concept album about sleep. Also available in a one-hour version if you're in a hurry. |
Sleepify | Silence is golden, especially when you're trying to fund a world tour. |
Smile | An unfinished Beach Boys album that is one of the most written-about and speculated-upon works in popular music history. |
Sweet Insanity | A rejected Brian Wilson album that was written and recorded with his ex-psychologist. Includes a rap song that opens with the line, "My name is Brian and I'm the man, I write hit songs with the wave of my hand!" Wilson's fans threatened to murder a critic for publishing a positive review. |
Trout Mask Replica | A chaotic 1969 pop album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band containing bizarre and disjointed musical compositions. |
Wake Up! | A rock album officially sanctioned by the Pope. |
Yesterday and Today | A North American release from the Beatles that is most notorious for its album art, which features the Fab Four posing with decapitated baby dolls and chunks of raw meat. |
Film
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3 Dev Adam | A Turkish movie featuring (unlicensed) Captain America and El Santo battling evil Spider-Man. Quite successful in Turkey, resulting in other unlicensed films such as the infamous Turkish Star Wars. |
100 Years | A movie that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren might be able to enjoy! |
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn | A movie about a director who makes a bad movie, but can't remove his name from the credits because his real name is Alan Smithee. In reality, the movie about the movie was so bad that director Arthur Hiller was credited as Alan Smithee to disguise himself from the production. |
Ambiancé | An experimental film that was scheduled to have a thirty day-long running time, with the only copy being destroyed after its premiere, only for it to be unexpectedly cancelled by the director after its release date passed without a showing. |
Atuk | A comedy screenplay, never filmed as its intended lead actors just kept dying. |
Barbenheimer | The biggest movie phenomenon of 2023, where Malibu meets the Manhattan Project. |
Big Dumb Object | A mysterious object (usually of extraterrestrial origin) in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder. |
Black and white hat symbolism in film | The hat, sir, whatever could it mean? |
William Castle | Horror director who loved a promotional gimmick. One film offered a $1000 insurance policy if you died of fright, and another offered audiences a full refund if they were too scared to see the ending. |
Cocksucker Blues | A Rolling Stones documentary which was banned from being shown unless the director was physically present. |
The Conqueror | John Wayne IS Genghis Khan! The filming location IS radioactive! |
The Cure for Insomnia | A movie that runs for 85 hours. Not the longest movie ever screened though (see below). |
The Day the Clown Cried | A notorious unreleased film about the Holocaust by Jerry Lewis – hey, it's a comedy! |
Deafula | A vampire movie shot entirely in American Sign Language. |
Death of a President | A mockumentary film created about the hypothetical future assassination of George W. Bush, released while he was still in office. |
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The opposite of the summer movie season. |
Empire | A film by Andy Warhol consisting entirely of eight hours of still footage of the Empire State Building. |
Empires of the Deep | A $140 million unreleased US-Chinese aqua-fantasy film that sunk to the depths of the sea... |
First on the Moon | Proof that the Soviets got there, thirty years before Armstrong and Aldrin didn't. |
Him | One of the most sought-after lost films is a 1974 gay porno about Jesus. |
I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney | "I knew I wanted to be a director, and I did a couple of short films, and this is the only one that haunts me." —Ben Affleck, Academy Award winner |
In the Aftermath | A B-movie studio gets the rights to a surrealist anime and re-edits it into a post-apocalyptic thriller. |
Italian Spiderman | An Australian production made with the goal of being a tribute to old Italian action films. |
Lee Kin-yan | A Hong Kong actor repeatedly cast in Stephen Chow films as a nose-picking, bearded transvestite. |
List of films featuring giant monsters | You are never safe in Tokyo. |
List of films featuring time loops | Study this to know what to do if you're trapped in a time loop. |
List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck" | Golly! |
Logistics | The world's longest movie ever made, it follows the entire five-week process of making and selling a pedometer in reverse chronological order. |
The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World | A movie that runs for 48 hours. Despite its title, it isn't the world's longest movie, but the jury's still out on whether it's the most meaningless.... |
Maidstone | A film notable for a real, bloody fight between its director and its star actor that was kept in the final edit. |
Manic Pixie Dream Girl | A female stock character in (usually) movies who is extremely eccentric and girlish, and serves mainly to motivate and/or provide character development for the male protagonist. |
Manos: The Hands of Fate | A low-budget film created by a fertilizer salesman from Texas, which is often considered to be the worst film of all time. |
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A very controversial abandoned film which would have depicted a bisexual Jesus engaged in robbery and drunkenness, personally condemned by Pope Paul VI. Its screenwriter was personally banned from entering the United Kingdom following its announcement. Since the 1980s, a widespread hoax has came up claiming that a similar film will feature Jesus as a swinger. |
Mockbuster | Not the movie you want, but the bargain-bin equivalent. |
Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki) | The second longest film ever shot: ten whole days of one decaying building Life After People-style and first screened in front of itself. The directors have a point. |
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish | A 1910s silent film about an ace detective who takes loads of cocaine. |
Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead | Part 2 has the longest film title in the English language. |
Norodom Sihanouk filmography | The prolific, decades-long filmmaking career of the former king and prime minister of Cambodia. |
Oscar bait | There are certain rules one follows when making an Oscar film. Including mental illness, the Holocaust and Meryl Streep in your film also helps. |
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North Korean cinema is best Korean cinema. |
The Overcoat | A Russian animated film that the director has been struggling to complete for forty years. |
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Created to test the patience of the British Board of Film Classification. |
Palm Dog Award | An award given out every year at the Cannes Film Festival to celebrate outstanding performances by dogs in movies. |
Passage de Vénus | A six second long "film" made in 1876, consisting of plates capturing the 1874 transit of Venus. Currently rated a 6.8 on IMDb. |
Patterson–Gimlin film | Bigfoot's most famous appearance. |
Pink Flamingos | A cult 1972 film following "the filthiest person alive", notorious for its deliberately disgusting content and culminating in to protagonist eating dog feces. |
Plan 9 from Outer Space | The epitome of so-bad-it's-good cinema. |
Pulgasari Shin Sang-ok |
An anti-feudal Godzilla-esque film, supposedly an allegory for unchecked capitalism, produced by Kim Jong-il, and directed by a South Korean filmmaker who Kim had ordered to be kidnapped along with his wife so that they could make films for the North. |
Rampart | A 2013 Woody Harrelson flick now infamous for its horrible marketing, including possibly the worst AMA of all time. |
Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa | An all-star cast appear in this badly written, badly animated picture. The producer apparently gave the animators $500,000 and didn't check their work until he saw it on television. |
Raza | A drama about a family's roles in the Spanish Civil War that was written and supposingly ghost-directed by Francisco Franco himself. Takes "history is written by the victors" to a new level. |
Reefer Madness | A 1930s anti-marijuana propaganda film which failed at its task so badly it became a cult classic within the marijuana subculture. |
Return of the Ewok | One of the rare cases of lost media within the Star Wars franchise. |
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Back in the 1970s, a family of African wildlife activists gathered together to make a movie with over 150 untrained big cats, leading to seventy members of the cast and crew getting injured. Its genre? A comedy, of course! |
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Perhaps the worst film ever created, filled with bad acting, poor dialogue, scenes that go nowhere, crazy behind-the-scenes, and more. And, of course, the man behind it all. |
Roundhay Garden Scene | The first ever moving picture, which lasted for an epic two seconds. |
Self-Portrait | An experimental film by Yoko Ono, featuring a 42-minute shot of John Lennon's half-erect penis. A later Lennon/Ono collaboration called Erection is surprisingly unrelated. |
Schichlegruber Doing the Lambeth Walk | Was the world's first video mashup British WW2 propaganda? |
Shaken, not stirred | Why 007 prefers his martini shaken. |
Sharknado | Exactly what it implies: Sharks + Tornado = the best damn disaster movie on earth. You better know it's got an ungodly amount of sequels and a cult following too! |
Smell-O-Vision | A system designed to enhance films with odors. Used once for the 1960 film Scent of Mystery and never again. |
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man | "I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us!" |
Stinking badges | Something nobody needs. Possibly the most frequently quoted and misquoted line from a movie ever. |
Taylor Mead's Ass | An Andy Warhol film consisting of a single prolonged shot of exactly what the title says. |
Titanic (1943 film) | A Historical Fiction drama made in Nazi Germany as a propaganda film. Weirdly enough, the movie was later extensively shown in the Communist Europe for its anti-greed story. |
Twin films | When two studios make the same idea at the same time. |
The Uranus Experiment | An unusually high-concept porn film that contains a real scene of sex in zero-gravity and was nominated for a Nebula science fiction award as an act of protest by a group of disgruntled authors. |
United Passions | A $30 million film sponsored by FIFA about how great they are. Came out right after the 2015 FIFA corruption case came to light. One of the lowest grossing sports movies of all time. |
Unsimulated sex | When two actors really have sex for a scene, rather than a simulation. |
Who Killed Captain Alex? | A 2010 Ugandan action-comedy film produced on a budget of $85. |
Wilhelm scream | A stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 and used in dozens of films (including seven Star Wars films, two Lord of the Rings films and Kill Bill). |
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey | Horror movie about Winnie-the-Pooh, from the director who probably hated that bear as a kid. The film went onto "win" five Razzies. |
Zyzzyx Road | Budget: $1.2 million. Box office: 30 bucks. It makes sense in context. |
Television
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2010 Georgian news report hoax | A "simulated" news broadcast that reported on the parliament's breakdown and deaths of politicians, including a reported assassination of the President, leading to Russia invading Georgia. It caused widespread panic accross the country and resulted to three deaths. |
Al Murray's Compete for the Meat | A British game show where the top prize is a frozen chicken and the second prize is some sausages. |
Alternative 3 | An April Fools joke by an ITV science show leads many to believe that scientists were being kidnapped to prepare for the colonization of Mars. |
Anti-Barney humor | An article for all Barney & Friends haters. |
Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos | Forget Turn-On – this never even made it to the end of its only episode. An American attempt fared little better. |
BBC Green Book | Comedy show broadcasting standards, circa 1949. Avoid the vulgar use of "basket", don't joke about stammering, and whatever you do don't mention the McGillycuddy of the Reeks! |
Bernd das Brot | The mascot of a German children's television network: a chronically depressed loaf of bread who laments his life and enjoys very boring activities. |
The Canadian Conspiracy | A mockumentary released in 1985 that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media. |
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On a clear night in April 1986, a frustrated electrical engineer jams HBO's signal to protest against its rates for satellite dish owners in what has been dubbed an act of "video terrorism". |
"The City on the Edge of Forever" | How an internal fight between the screenwriter and the series creator resulted in one of the most celebrated episodes of the original Star Trek series. |
Conspiracy 58 | A mockumentary that claimed that the 1958 World Cup was never actually held. Despite being revealed as a hoax at the end, people still believed it. |
Dinner for One | A classic British comedy sketch, virtually unknown in its homeland, that has become the most-repeated television programme in German history. |
Don't Scare the Hare | A British television game show involving a large robotic hare and an underground forest. It was not popular and lasted only one season. |
Flanderization | When a TV character becomes a literal caricature of their initial form. |
Flemish Secession hoax | Our regular programming is now interrupted to declare independence from Belgium. |
The Force is with Cristal Beer | Imagine waking up to watch Star Wars only to be served beer advertisements. |
Friday night death slot | Where TV shows go to die. |
Graggle Simpson | What do you mean, "who"? You know him! He's your favorite Simpsons character! |
Greg Packer | A man on the street, no matter which street you're talking about. |
De Grote Donorshow | An apparently terminally ill woman offers her kidney to one of three lucky patients live on TV. Controversy erupts before broadcast, in which it is then revealed that the whole show is a hoax meant to draw attention to the lack of available organ donors in the Netherlands. |
Guy Goma BBC interview | A man who went to the BBC for a job interview is instead interviewed on its news channel about the Apple Corps v. Apple Computer lawsuit. |
Heil Honey I'm Home! | Hitler has his own sitcom, with his Jewish neighbors. |
Historiography of The Simpsons | An in-depth analysis of whether, when and why people stopped finding The Simpsons funny. |
History of Pop | How a TV program guide became an actual channel. |
"Hold on Tight!" (Inside No. 9) | An entirely fake episode of the dark comedy anthology series Inside No. 9, featuring mocked-up photos and clips for a trailer, designed to trick the show's viewers. |
"How to Eat with Your Butt" | The plot and the title of this South Park episode are pretty strange, even by the show's standards. |
Hypothetical | The only quiz containing only hypothetical questions, such as: "You must steal Russell Crowe's shower gel. How do you do it?", "How much money do you have to be paid to eat a packet of crisps every time you have a conversation with someone for a year?", and the stone-cold original: "Big hat or small hat?" |
I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant | A documentary series on TLC. You can probably guess the plot. |
It's So Funny | A North Korean comedy show which is anything but funny. |
I Wanna Marry "Harry" | An American reality show to find "Prince Harry" (really an actor they tried to pass off as him) a wife. Meghan Markle was not a contestant. |
John Dillermand | A Danish children's series featuring a man gets into all sorts of (family friendly) trouble with his elongated penis. |
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A Maccababy's gotta do what a Maccababy's gotta do. |
Jumping the shark | Metaphor, based on something that Fonzie actually did on an episode of Happy Days, for the moments when popular TV series lose all credibility and have undeniably entered their twilight years. |
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Through countless VCR recordings and pattern memorization, this man became Press Your Luck's biggest winner ever. |
List of Saturday Night Live incidents | From Ashlee Simpson's lip-sync fail to Adrien Brody's possibly racist introduction to Sean Paul. |
Max Headroom signal hijacking | TV signals in Chicago are twice overpowered on 22 November 1987 by broadcasts featuring a person (possibly a male) disguised as the 1980s virtual TV character Max Headroom. The source of the broadcasts and the people involved remain unknown. |
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The real former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev starred in a Pizza Hut commercial. What more can I say? |
Nasubi Susunu! Denpa Shōnen |
A man who became famous after appearing in a reality show in which he was locked in an apartment for 11 months until he won ¥1 million from mail-in sweepstakes. Said show also featured, among other things, two men who had to hitchhike their way from the Cape of Good Hope to Norway, a challenge to shave the beard of Fidel Castro, and a segment in which baseball fans would only be allowed to eat if their supported team won a game. |
Odagiri effect | Turns out that women find sexy men on TV shows quite appealing. |
Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon | Exactly as the title says, it's an anime about a guy who was reborn as a vending machine. |
Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell | What's wrong Shaun? Why must you be mad as hell? |
Will Smith–Chris Rock slapping incident | What happens when a G.I. Jane joke goes horribly wrong. At an awards ceremony. On worldwide television. |
Soap opera rapid aging syndrome | A tragic condition suffered by some young characters on soap operas. |
Southern Television broadcast interruption | A news program in England interrupted by an interstellar message from Vrillon, representative of the mighty Ashtar Galactic Command. |
Space Cadets | Four lucky average Joes got tricked into thinking that they were shot into space. The entire show was, in fact, so planned out that people thought the contestants were actors - basically making the show a prank in itself. |
Spaghetti-tree hoax | Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. |
Star Wars Holiday Special | What do you get when you combine Star Wars and Christmas? One of the worst films of all time. |
Superstar USA | A music competition looking for the worst singers America has to offer. |
Tomorrow's Pioneers | A Palestinian children's show produced by Hamas and co-hosted by various costumed characters, including one resembling Mickey Mouse. Most of said costumed characters are killed by Jews in some violent manner. |
Turn-On | An ABC comedy series that was cancelled even before the first episode had finished. |
"Turner Doomsday Video" | When he founded CNN, Ted Turner made sure they would be ready for the end of the world. |
TV pickup | Britons regularly cause massive power surges by simultaneously making tea during program breaks. |
Uh Oh! | 90's Canadian children's game show, with an energetic wacky host, fun trivia questions, and a leather daddy dumping slime on kids! What could go wrong! |
Very special episode | A genre of television episodes with controversial life lessons interweaved into the storyline, popularized by Blossom. |
Wank Week | A Channel 4 project for all those who think there aren't enough jerks on TV. |
Tommy Westphall | How an autistic child and Detective Munch may be responsible for more than 200 TV series. |
Who's Your Daddy? | To win $100,000, adoptees have to pick their biological father out of 25 men. |
Zuiikin' English | A Japanese TV series from 1992 which combined gymnastic exercises with the teaching of "useful" English language phrases, such as "Spare me my life!", "I am allergic to penicillin", "I have a bad case of diarrhea" and "Lovely golf weather today!" |
Video games
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Action 52 | Inspired by Taiwanese NES multicarts, one businessman sets to create an all-American version with original games... but leaves the devs only 3 months to create 52 of them, resulting in disaster. Also, a tie-in comic book for a franchise that never got started, and a contest where the game is so bugged you can't even enter it. |
The Adventures of Ninja Nanny & Sherrloch Sheltie | An "educational" PC game from 1993 that became notorious decades later for being built upon random public domain media strewn together in a wildly nonsensical fashion, complete with animation, audio clips, hyperlinked text, and some sort of plot. |
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Are your video games not selling? Why not do what Atari did and bury them in a New Mexico landfill? |
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A physics-based puzzle game about rats killing cats. It was so bad it became a viral gag gift and got a sequel. |
Bartle taxonomy of player types | What type of gamer are you? |
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A player-versus-player battle in Eve Online which involved over 7,500 players, lasted 21 hours, and cost over $300,000 worth of in-game currency. |
Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em | An early "erotic" game for the Atari 2600. Control a pair of nude women trying to catch and eat falling semen. |
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A racing game considered one of the worst of all time with Metacritic's worst-ever score of 8/100. It has opponents that don't move, the ability to drive through buildings and accelerate infinitely in reverse, and a notorious "YOU'RE WINNER !" [sic] message after each race. |
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A controversial 2002 video game mixing strippers with BMX cycling. |
Bob's Game | An unreleased homebrew game of a game, in a game, within a game. The developer went on a protest against the evil corporation known as "Gantendo". |
Boong-Ga Boong-Ga | The first arcade game about shoving a giant finger up someone's anus. |
Boss key | A special key or key combination used in computer games to quickly hide the game from superiors or coworkers. |
Breast physics | Follow the bouncing boobs! |
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm | A sequel in name only to a classic beat 'em up, based on an unrelated comic book that predates the first game, and programmed by none other than Elon Musk. |
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The best video game ever: A $10 software calculator. |
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Considered among the worst puzzles of any video game. |
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Hallelujah! Shoot possessed Roman soldiers with a magical sword until they turn Christian and start to pray. |
Chex Quest | Doom for ages 6 and up, made as a promotion for Chex cereal. |
Cho Aniki | A long-running series of games from Japan, known for their absurdist humor and homoeroticism, about the quest of sweaty bodybuilders for protein supplements. |
Communist Mutants from Space | A Cold War Space Invaders clone in which you do battle with the Mother Creature, driven mad by radioactive vodka. |
Concord | A 2024 hero shooter that was 8 years in development. It sold so poorly, and had so little players that it shut down after 2 weeks or 14 days of opperation. For perspective: the average lifespan of a housefly is around 28 days. Still didn't stop them from making an adaptation though. |
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An unintentional virtual epidemic in World of Warcraft, which became an important medical case study. |
Crab Champions | From the guy who brought you "Crab Rave". Be a crab. Have a gun. Shoot up a beach. 🦀. |
Cubic Ninja | A game that ended up being resold for over $500 due to its unintentional ability to let a 3DS run homebrew. |
Dance Dance Immolation | It's exactly like Dance Dance Revolution, just with flamethrowers pointed at you. |
Dark Room Sex Game | Contains explicit sex. Contains no graphics. |
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A chronicle of fourteen years of development hell, complete with four changes of engines, lawsuits, and profane responses to company executives. The end result was judged by critics to have been very much not worth the wait. |
Don't Buy This | A rare example of truth in advertising. |
Edge Games | A company that decided that the "Edge" in their name was so important that it started to sue everything video game-related using that word. Until Electronic Arts got involved. |
Eggplant run | A challenge playthrough of Spelunky in which you carry an eggplant and toss it into the final boss's face. |
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Perhaps the most racist video game ever made. |
Fortnite Holocaust Museum | A virtual museum on the victims of the Holocaust created in Fortnite. |
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Goats' contributions to gaming aren't all positive. |
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What do you mean, you've never fantasised about being a goat? Enough people have to warrant the oddly named sequel Goat Simulator 3. |
Goodboy Galaxy | A video game made for the Game Boy Advance ...made in 2023 (for its 20th anniversary). |
The Great Giana Sisters | A game that was withdrawn from the shelves virtually as soon as it went on them. |
Grezzo 2 | Doom mod that spoofs modern Italian culture, featuring blasphemous references to the Catholic Church, including the main character killing Jesus. Twice. |
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A dating sim where your romantic partners are all sapient birds. |
Hong Kong 97 | A video game where you play as Bruce Lee's superpowered, heroin-addicted cousin, who has been assigned to kill the entire population of China. The giant head of Deng Xiaoping has been revived as a weapon of mass destruction and the death screen displays an actual dead body from the Yugoslav Wars. |
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All you had to do was do yo' damn girlfriend, CJ! |
I Am Bread | You play as bread. |
"I am Error" | A line line said by a character in Zelda II, |
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A very creative marketing strategy for Halo 2. |
I Love You, Colonel Sanders! | A dating sim where you romance KFC founder Colonel Sanders. The best part: It's official. |
Incidente em Varginha | Brazil's first ever first-person shooter is based on a UFO sighting. Also used to train Army division soldiers. |
Incredible Crisis | Just an ordinary day in the life of a family... |
Islamic Fun | All the classic Muslim-themed educational games you could want. Help build a mosque! Race some rabbits! Defend Lebanon against Israel's 1978 invasion! Wait, what? |
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A first-person shooter where the player gets to kill President John F. Kennedy and is rewarded for accurately recreating his assassination. |
Kanye Quest 3030 | Just an innocent game about Kanye West. There definitely aren't any secret cults lying around! |
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He's definitely in his zone... |
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Play an assassin inhabited by the personas of seven dead hitmen and use their abilities to fight a terrorist group of virus-infected humans while uncovering conspiracies about Japan's interference in US politics and being haunted by your former victims. |
Laden VS USA | In the early 2000s, a shady Chinese LCD game manufacturer decided that 9/11 was the hottest new cash-grab. |
List of video games notable for negative reception | And we were so sure No Man's Sky would be a hit! |
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The trippiest game in existence. |
Mighty No. 9 | A video game notable for having the longest closing credits of any media, at just under 3 hours and 48 minutes long, in part thanks to the game's sluggish and somewhat mismanaged development and the developers' decision to credit all 71,494 of the game's Kickstarter backers. |
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A Pokémon species that only appears as the result of a glitch and has since been the subject of many sociological studies. |
Mister Mosquito | Be a mosquito. |
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog | As an April Fools' joke, Sega released a free visual novel where you have to investigate the murder of Sonic. It's sweeter than it sounds. |
Ninja Golf | Hole in your enemies! |
Nuclear Gandhi | According to an urban legend, a bug in Civilization makes Mahatma Gandhi prone to start a nuclear war. More recent games in the series made it a feature. |
Overwatch and pornography | Yes, many people would like to "Nerf This!" |
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A compendium of games to trick your friends, including Desert Bus, a painstakingly realistic eight-hour bus journey from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas. |
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Save people from thirst! But not from tooth decay. |
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Bored of playing your usual video games? Try PETA's Super Chick Sisters and Super Tofu Boy, they will definitely get you to work. |
Phalanx | Who knew that putting an old man playing a banjo on the box of an unrelated game would make for effective marketing? |
Playing History 2 - Slave Trade | An educational game that featured a minigame where you would fit slaves into a slave ship like Tetris pieces. |
Pokémon and pornography | Hey guys, did you know that in terms of male human and female Pokémon breeding, Vaporeon is the most compatible Pokémon for humans? |
Pokémon Uranium | A fangame set in a region of the Pokémon universe that was victim to a nuclear disaster. |
Polybius | An arcade game that supposedly causes its players to go insane. |
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The height of North Korea's gaming industry tries to lull you into travelling there. |
Quest for Bush | A first-person shooter, released by al-Qaeda's propaganda arm, with George W. Bush as its final boss. |
Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon | A game for the Super Nintendo that aims to educate kids about the harmful effects of smoking. The game's publisher, Raya, also published a few other health-themed games, such as Captain Novolin about diabetes and Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus about asthma. |
Seaman | A game where you take care of a fish with a human head while being guided by Leonard Nimoy. |
Sex with Hitler | Want to get frisky with the Führer? |
Sex with Stalin | Seize the means of (re)production! |
Simlish | The language spoken by characters in The Sims. |
Soda Drinker Pro | The gamified menial task of drinking soda that contains a hidden surrealist minigame compilation. |
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This surreal fangame, said to be unfinished Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Dreamcast, pulls no punches to the notorious Sonic fandom. |
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Hezbollah recreated its battles against Israel as a first-person shooter... twice. |
Stalin vs. Martians | The Man of Steel takes on an alien menace. |
The Story of Kamikuishiki Village | A resource management strategy game created by the same people responsible for Hong Kong 97 where you play as Shoko Asahara and the end goal is to carry out the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. Often mistakenly believed to have been created by Aum Shinrikyo themselves as propaganda. |
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A gamified(?) recreation of the Columbine massacre, featuring a Hell sequence where the perpetrators fight South Park-style Satan. Allegedly the Dawson College shooter's favorite game. |
Syobon Action | A platformer known for its levels designed to cause extreme frustration. |
Takeshi no Chōsenjō | A deliberately unfair and confusing video game made by Takeshi Kitano, noted video game hater. |
Tetris effect | A psychological effect where Tetris players start arranging blocks in the real world. |
Thatcher's Techbase | A mod of Doom II where the main goal is to kill an undead Margaret Thatcher. |
The Thompson Twins Adventure | One of the only video games to ever be released via vinyl record. |
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion | A young turnip goes on a quest to evade taxes; see also its sequel Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. |
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A game where you can bother the inhabitants of an English village. As a goose. |
Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them! | A game parodying advertisements for mobile games. |
You Have to Burn the Rope | ...and doing the titular task takes about half as long as listening to the credits song. |
Internet memes and online culture
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An Indonesian kid who gained fame by staring into his camera for two hours. |
A group where we all pretend to be boomers | A group of Facebook friends who decided to pretend to be elderly. |
All your base are belong to us | A phrase that originated in the 1989 video game Zero Wing and sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002. |
Babiniku | The phenomenon of men on the Internet depicting themselves as anime women, often without using voice changers. |
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A very strange online urban legend originating from the concept of liminal spaces. |
Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash | A Facebook group dedicated to memes about American politician Bernie Sanders. |
Bogdanoff twins | A pair of French twin brothers known for their extravagant looks and (pseudo)scientific claims; which made them the subject of a long-lasting internet meme involving aliens, secret knowledge and bear markets. |
Boobquake | Female users of social networking websites agree to determine whether their scandalous clothing can cause earthquakes. |
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The Internet was once titillated over this Bowser-Peach fusion. |
British scientists | Not a list of some scientific pioneers from Europe, but a Russian internet meme. |
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A Hong Kong resident gets into an uncomfortably tense argument with a fellow passenger—all caught on video. |
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You thought My Little Pony could never be loved by grown men. Wrong. Very wrong. |
Carstuckgirls.com | An erotic(?) website devoted to women trying to free their cars from various obstacles. |
Chad | From the incel forums comes this whole new slang. |
Cinnamon challenge | Unless you enjoy lung damage, please do not try this at home. Actually, better yet, don't try it at all. |
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Ever thought a Tide pod looked kind of like candy? Apparently you're not alone. |
Countryballs | A comic genre with balls and other bits for different countries doing what real countries do. |
Crush on Obama | That's great. |
Cursed image | Low quality images with a mysterious aura, sometimes with a comedic effect. |
Cute cat theory of digital activism | "Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats." — Ethan Zuckerman |
Dancing baby | One of the very first internet memes: a weird 3D baby dancing in 1996. |
DashCon | A Tumblr convention where the organisers unexpectedly announced that the hotel needed $17,000 extra - and that was just the first day. Anyone fancy an extra hour in the ball pit? |
Dave rule | "Dave-to-girl ratio" as gender balance criterion. |
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very readers, such article, much wiki |
Elsagate | Here kids, watch these YouTube videos with Elsa and Spider-Man, I'm sure nothing inappropriate will be on them... |
Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten | If that's not a good enough reason why you shouldn't, I don't know what is. |
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A state that everybody reading this can probably relate to. |
Florida Man | Superhero native to the state of Florida best known for his frequent run-ins with law enforcement and intoxicating substances. |
Getting to Philosophy | All links lead to Philosophy. |
Godwin's law | Every long, protracted online discussion always ends with comparisons of others to Hitler. Really... |
Goncharov | The 1973 Martin Scorsese classic... that was entirely made up by the Internet 49 years later. |
Googling | Google created a verb that is really in the dictionary. |
Half-Life: Full Life Consequences | The worst Half-Life fan fiction ever written, later adapted to video. |
Hampster Dance | A web page featuring dancing hamsters set to music. |
"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" | A 2018 ClickHole article about a truly devastating moment, complete with a stock image of a random Spanish man. |
Homunculus loxodontus | A bizarre blob-like creature known in Russia as "The One Who Waits". |
Sam Hyde | A transgressive American comedian blamed for numerous terrorist attacks and killings. |
Instagram egg | An image of any old egg...is what this egg would be if it didn't take over Instagram and become the most-liked post on the internet until December 2022. |
It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers | A viral online essay celebrating the joys of Autumn. |
The Jerma985 Dollhouse | Streamer sets about making an interactive version of The Truman Show with himself as the main character. |
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What if Joe Biden was actually pretty rad? |
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The face-off of the century to determine who could keep the name Josh. |
Eduard Khil | Our eternal Mr. Trololo. |
Lasagna Cat | Live-action reenactments of Garfield strips followed by absurd concluding pieces, including a mouse performing oral sex on Garfield, Odie committing suicide, and John Blyth Barrymore musing over a single strip for a whole hour. Don't even get me started on the ending to "Sex Survey Results"... |
Lenin was a mushroom | A hoax that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became a mushroom himself. |
Markovian parallax denigrate | Three random words that caused over 25 years of mystery. |
Meow Wars | A flame war on Usenet that lasted for over 2 years. |
Microsoft acquisition of the Roman Catholic Church | Sadly for those who were hoping for an online Eucharist, this was an early Internet hoax. |
Miguxês | A brief guide to Portuguese Internet slang. |
NAFO (group) | An internet meme and social media movement which fights Russian internet propoganda through shitposting and trolling. |
Neuro-sama | Who said a VTuber even needs a human behind it? To that idea, Neuro says "(Filtered)". |
No Nut November | ...and its antithesis, Destroy Dick December. |
Nukemap | New York got blown up by the Tsar Bomba! Well, at least you can do that in this. |
Numa Numa | Or how a fat kid dancing to the O-Zone song "Dragostea din tei" in front of his computer became very popular. |
Omission of New Zealand from maps | New Zealand is forgotten from maps so often it has become a meme. |
Omission of Tasmania from maps of Australia | And Tasmania is not any luckier... |
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Little-known fact: all articles on this page were written by a team of Golden Retrievers. And thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, you didn't know until now. |
OS-tan | A small Internet phenomenon where certain types of software (including various Microsoft and Linux operating systems) are depicted as young anime women. |
PewDiePie vs T-Series | A competition between two YouTube channels to be the most subscribed channel. |
Philosophical zombie | I am dead, therefore I eat brains. |
Planet X637Z-43 | A planet covered in cannabis! Well, that's what they want you to think. |
Press F to pay respects | Have you ever wondered why you might see the letter "F" being spammed on pages about someone's death? |
Rickrolling | Careful: that link you're about to click on might take you to a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". |
Rule 34 | "If it exists, there is Internet porn of it." |
Mark V. Shaney | A fake Usenet user whose computer-generated postings were created using Markov chain techniques. |
Shitposting | 🗿 |
Shock site | Don't look! (No, really.) |
Shrek fandom | Maybe "fandom" isn't the correct word? |
Sitting and Smiling | A YouTube series in which a man sits and smiles for four hours, documenting his descent into inevitable madness. |
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One of the most popular web series among the children of today is a series of animated YouTube Shorts about the battle for world domination between a race of toilets with human heads and a race of humans with cameras for heads. |
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An Internet meme which, as all great things, began on Facebook and spiralled a bit of out control, and of course Wikipedians couldn't be stopped in making it its own article. |
Suntukan sa Ace Hardware | Fight Club taking place at a hardware store of all places. |
Techno Viking | When the protagonist of a meme sues its creator. |
Ted Cruz–Zodiac Killer meme | A mock conspiracy theory gone wild. |
Time Cube | The personal website of a schizophrenic old man who claimed that time is "cubic" in nature and that all of modern science is a lie. |
John Titor | The name of a purported time traveller from the year 2036. He posted on several time travel-related Internet bulletin boards during 2000/2001. |
This Man | The dreamiest man you'll ever meet. |
Tourist guy | The picture of a Hungarian man on 9/11. |
Twitter suspensions | Tweeting's not a right, it's a privilege. |
Unusual eBay listings | Those strange things people sell on the Internet... |
uwu | *notices ur Wikipedia article* owo what's this? uwu |
Very erotic very violent | See also very good very mighty. |
wikiFeet | The world's largest image sharing website devoted to foot fetishism. |
WTFPL | A public domain software license whose abbreviation stands for "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License". |
Wikipedia Star Trek Into Darkness debate | Is it "into" or "Into"? Listed at Wikipedia's lamest edit wars. |
Yaminjeongeum | 세종머앟늰익 읚머한 윾산. |
See also List of Internet memes.
Festivals
[edit]Kanamara Matsuri | A phallus festival in Kawasaki, Japan. |
Mexico City Alebrije Parade | Parade and contest of giant alebrijes ("colorful monsters"). |
Testicle festival | "Would you like to supersize those?" |
Stage shows
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All in a Row | A play about a child on the autism spectrum... portrayed as an inhuman-looking puppet who makes his family's lives miserable. |
Cherry Sisters | The first truly "so bad it's good" act, whose vaudeville performances drew packed houses of audiences who just wanted to hurl abuse at them. Sued newspapers for printing a negative review of them, and lost. |
The Elvis Dead | Evil Dead II retold in the style of Elvis Presley, later released on VHS in 2020. "I gonna build a groovy chainsaw arm". |
In My Life | Brain cancer, OCD, a child killed by a drunk driver... all subjects made light of in this surreal musical by the guy who wrote "You Light Up My Life". |
Jahrhundertring | The centenary production of the Ring cycle was transported to the Industrial Revolution, with the gods as capitalist fat cats and the Rhinemaidens as prostitutes. Near-riots ensued. |
Jerry Springer: The Opera | This musical has got it all, from God and Satan to the KKK. |
Moose Murders | A bizarre play that became a byword for the worst of Broadway. Signature moment: an apparently-unplanned scene where a paraplegic man wrapped in bandages gets up to kick a man in a moose costume in the crotch. |
Mortal Kombat: Live Tour | A family friendly adapation of a violent video game. To make things even better, there was audience participation. |
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark | At $75 million, the most expensive Broadway musical, which is infamous for its troubled production history and cast member accidents. Also holds the record for the largest number of preview showings (182) before the official opening. |
- See also