Christina H
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As we learned a few months ago, Amazon.com is apparently a hidden treasure trove of aspiring comedy writers. Digging up ridiculous products and writing amazingly sarcastic reviews for them has become the Internet's favorite pastime.
So let us salute more of these works of unappreciated genius.
Yep. That is a rubber scrotum. Before you pull out your credit card, it's currently going for about $150, and it comes with realistic tumors built in to train people how to check for tumors of the balls. Reviewers have found more uses though:
Meanwhile, it seems like its intended use is problematic for the non-professional:
And finally, Timothy has a practical cost-benefit analysis:
Just as an aside, the price being $151 now, that's only 302 fondles a month you'll need to reach that value target.
Dads, do you like to give your children piggyback rides but don't find it creepy enough? How about an actual saddle? The kind you would put on a horse?
And there's no reason it only needs to go on dads. It can be used to evoke an uncomfortable feeling of misogyny just as well as it can evoke inappropriate images of adult-child contact.
Wandrwoman, clearly an experienced equestrian, has some practical tips:
These pants were clearly designed for people with a love of America and a hatred of fashion. Or, you know, Napoleon Dynamite fans.
How many reviews were entirely Napoleon Dynamite quotes? you might wonder, and the answer is six. Out of 28. Let's pass those and move on to:
Sorry, French people, we are never going to let that go. On a different tack, there's this guy:
I cut that off right there because he went on to quote the entire U.S. flag code.
There is definitely a lot to think about there, like: "The flag should be hoisted briskly and lowered ceremoniously (section 6b)," and the section about how to display it at half-mast.
So once you get past the initial, "what a stupid book" impression, I'll tell you that once upon a time, when there were no computers, people needed random numbers generated for experiments and shit. So they actually looked in a book to get those numbers.
Anyway, we have computers now. So it's time to go back to sarcastically making fun of how useless this book is.
This one might take a little while to get, or maybe I'm just slower than you are:
Probably the most interesting phenomenon is that most of the recent reviews have themselves been random about completely different books or products. Whether this is a database glitch or people trying to be really meta in their reviews, it's pretty neat to be looking for random number jokes and then find:
Amazon.co.uk brings us some of that trademark dry British "humour" (it is like "humor" but metric) in a whopping 224 reviews of an ordinary Bic ballpoint pen.
Satire is out in full swing as reviewers skewer the digital age with fairly fresh takes on the "this generation doesn't remember how pens work" joke.
As good as some pointed social commentary can be, however, sometimes a person just likes to see a couple of penis jokes.
Those of you who care about things like "reality" and "truth" probably want to know if this is an actual product because you have lost your sense of childlike wonder. Fine. Proporta is a real company that makes mostly electronic accessories. For "humour" purposes (they are also British), they've listed this fake product on their own website for about $1.5 million, and when they ported their store to Amazon, that product got put up too.
Which is good news for us because that means it's open to Amazon user reviews, from good old straight-up sarcasm:
To some fine elephant dong jokes (that's the censored word there, if you live in a bubble):
Official name: 3M 8979N Performance Plus Nuclear Duct Tape, Slate Blue 48mm Wide x 54.8M Long
You're probably wondering what is so "nuclear" about this duct tape, and if it's really that important that it's slate blue. Well, yes. According to the product description: "The slate blue color makes it ideal for use in nuclear tape facilities and it is certified for low leachable halogens and sulfur."
Apparently people who only use it to block low leachable halogens and sulfur are unambitious pussies because Amazon reviewers really seem to be getting 110 percent out of this tape.
And finally, did you realize that one ethnic group that it's still totally OK to caricature for humor purposes is Russians? I'm just saying, get 'em in while you still can.
And be sure to check out our sarcastic reviews on everything in the world in our bestselling book.
For more from Christina, check out 6 Ways Cities Are Getting Into the Attention-Whore Game and A History of Pop Culture's Obsession with Human/Cat Hybrids.
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