My longest and most dedicated relationship is with the internet. I love it. I love that we’ve given every single person on the Earth the power to access and contribute to the world’s knowledge. I love that we mostly use it to watch other people melt down or occasionally melt down ourselves. I’ve been paralysed by the thought of compiling this list. After all, I’ve probably seen hundreds of thousands – if not millions! – of posts by this point. To me, each of them is a precious gift. A brief glimpse into the minds of every type of person, all in the pursuit of earning precious internet points and the occasional pile-on. Who am I, just a humble internet idiot, to decide what are the 10 funniest things that I’ve seen on the internet? How can one possibly make that determination? I am professionally a journalist, well known to be among the most humourless and insufferable of all trades, which makes preparing this an even bigger ask. Nevertheless, I have slaved over this list and come up with something that I think captures the full majesty of the internet’s wonders and horrors. Bon voyage! 1. Baby with a gun in the group chat About once every couple of weeks, I think of this exchange. The premise is simple: post baby with a gun in a group chat you were accidentally invited to. It’s the reactions between the women that takes it to a new level. Someone asking whether it’s a baby with a gun? The “Who post baby with a gun”? Another person positing that the picture could be Barb as a baby. My sides hurt just thinking about these grown women trying to parse this. I wanted to find out what happened next so I messaged the tweeter @cyberc00tie. They told me that after posting the baby, they never sent any other messages to the group, even as the women kept on chatting about doing errands. Weirdly, though, it turns out they were connected. “Funny enough my friend’s friend saw it come up on her timeline. And it was her mom’s group chat,” she told me via Twitter DM. “Apparently only she thought it was funny the rest of them didn’t get it hahahah.” 2. The Barnaby piss photo For those who are blissfully unaware, Barnaby Joyce is a philandering caricature of a farmer who was briefly the second in charge of the Australian government, which says everything you need to know about Australian politics. After stepping down amid controversy, he tried to post through it by grandstanding on just the weirdest shit. Perhaps his peak odd moment was when he tweeted this picture of piss. Even having just reread the post, I can’t even remember what point he was trying to make. My eyes only focus on the piss. 3. The Ikea TikTok guy These TikToks capture the rage of working in retail. I spent the better part of a year in university working at Tie Rack, a store that despite its name also sold scarves, jelly shoes, kaftans, you name it. They underpaid me and all I got out of it was a shitload of ugly ass ties that I never wear. I still don’t know what a kaftan is. 4. Life under a Greens majority government Fungbunger was the Twitter user who got me hooked on the site. Back in 2015-ish, I was an occasional user and he was already a pretty big Aussie account. I remember seeing him tweet something deranged and distinctively Australian, and I just thought to myself, “you can do that?” He told me that the above post – his GOAT, among many good ones – is a personal fave. “I think this post sends a very important message – I just have no idea what that message is,” he said. 5. A KNIFE! One of my pet peeves is obviously-set-up video gags that are all over YouTube and TikTok. I can’t stand them. On the other end of the spectrum, occasionally a natural moment of a comedy will happen that’s so perfect that it can’t have possibly been planned. And sometimes, that moment is caught on camera – like happening across a shooting star – and then is shared with the world. This video is a perfect example of that. I don’t think you could make this if you tried. (Fun fact: the woman who yells out in the video isn’t the child’s mother, but a friend of the child’s cousin who was also at the party.) 6. Oi can I grab a lift? My mum’s side of the family is from rural Australia – specifically Narrabri, New South Wales. Even as my sister got all the country genes and I got all the city ones, I still have a soft spot for the chaotic energy of farmboy antics. Farmboy antics are a distinct subcategory of “dudes rock” genre. They take the triumphalist, ingenious and juvenile approach to stereotypically male pursuits and combine it with the recklessness and freedoms that only comes with living and working on farms. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube have been a godsend for farmboys who are now able to broadcast their antics to the entire world and we are all the better for being able to see it. Letting your ute drift across a paddock with a sheep in the front seat so you can run alongside it and ask for a lift? That’s a textbook farmboy antic. 7. ‘I am pro-life and take no pleasure in reporting this’ One of life’s great pleasures is having a front row seat to people’s minds being dissolved by the internet. After enough time in the swamps of social media, brain worms come for all of us – no matter how rich, poor, famous or irrelevant. It is the great equaliser. I forgot until just now that Louise Mensch, an early leader of Resistance Twitter, was at one point a conservative member of British parliament. She’s also the author of one of the world’s greatest tweets. In the feverishness of Trump’s early presidency when things were more absurd than even the most breathless pundits had predicted, people seemed to lose a bit of a grip on reality – sharing wild speculation or outright conspiracy theories about the new administration. Somehow, Mensch topped all that. For me, it’s the combination of super serious language (“My sources say”) with the most obviously ridiculous conspiracy theory and the faux-nobility that she tries to couch it in (“[I] take no pleasure in reporting this”). In October 2019, Mensch doubled down on her claim when asked by a friend of mine whether Bannon was still in the crosshairs. I tweeted at Mensch to ask if it was still on the cards in 2021 but she has yet to respond. 8. Was the grink there? Everyone has a friend who will try to hamfistedly shoehorn a dunk on you into every conversation. 9. Bradman was rubbish compared to today’s players This is a real deep cut but it resonates. There’s something particularly deranged about the comment sections of sports content. A mix of obsessive fanboyism and the low stakes of sports leads to strangers absolutely losing their shit over minutiae while also being objective, completely wrong. You want to argue with confidence that current Philadelphia 76ers bench player Matisse Thybulle would have absolutely put the clamps on Michael Jordan in the 1996 NBA finals, potentially saving the SuperSonics franchise from leaving Seattle? Sure! I mean, there’s no way to know for sure. And if you post it enough, with enough confidence, while twisting statistics, history, and logic; well, people might just believe you. 10. Horny for Post Malone Being horny for Post Malone is funny. Newcastle is funny. Being horny for Novacastrians? Now, that’s really funny.