Henry Stone: the 10 funniest things I have ever seen (on the internet)

I write comedy and I direct comedy, and all of the money I make is from making comedy. However not all of the comedy I make is for making money. I like making things that are borne of nothing other than my fancy being tickled. I’m biased because I’m me and me is a perfect boy, but I’m pretty sure that this is the exactly correct way to approach your craft; one for you, one for them.

Ira Glass likes to talk about the taste gap and I like to talk about Ira Glass talking about the taste gap. It’s the mental chasm you find yourself in when you’re really into your chosen creative pursuit but you haven’t flexed your own muscle enough yet and you KNOW IT and it hurts cos you know you suck. I want to half-hijack my own funniest things list to celebrate the taste-gap-closing creative phase because I feel like its necessity is slowly being ignored.

This is a list of the funniest things on the internet that I know have been made only for the love of the process. No budgets or institutional support – simply really funny ideas explored to what appears to be the limit of the creators’ resources and abilities at the time. Has anyone laboured the ideology behind a selection criteria for a funny videos listicle as much as this? Probably not, but I’m trying to close up my opinion-piece-writing taste gap cos I’m thinking about starting a locky-d newsletter so like, forgive me?

1. Tiny Fuppets

Wow the Tiny Fuppets are AMAZE! I STAN TINY FUPPETS! If you don’t know about the Tiny Fuppets well they are simply just some Fuppets who are tiny teehee. This series started in 2011 and not too long after the creators became Conan writers.

2. Aunty Donna - GPS tries to kill man

Feels like you’re legally required to have an Aunty Donna video in your Guardian 10 funniest things list – they themselves had a list populated almost entirely with their own videos (due to the law I guess). Here we find the Donnas in 2012 being very funny and dumb and now we find them everywhere being funny and dumb cos they closed up their gap noice and toight.

3. F the Internet

A public-access-aping sketch that breaks out of the confines of its well-trodden framing with a confidently silly central performance and a clear willingness in the film-making to find the comedy on the day. This is 2015. Three years later star/writer/director Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough started working for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

4. The New Pet Detectives

2013, my best friends Sam and Greg form the dream team of them, Tom Ward and Jonathan Schuster, to make a sketch for our shared YouTube. They’re in Melbourne and I’ve only just moved to Sydney so I wasn’t involved at all and therefore don’t feel grotty about putting it on my list. Eight years later, The New Pet Detectives makes me laugh every time and even though it ends with literally an apology for how shit they thought it was, all of them have closed up their gaps enough to continue to make comedy on bigger and crazier world stages.

5. Redfern Electrical

This one’s some red-hot 2021 business. John Cruckshank, beyond being a man of the people, is achingly funny and along with his film-making collaborator Luke Smith has the storytelling prowess to make this work of autofiction both hilarious moment-to-moment as well as structurally watertight. Together they’ve got more chops than Sam Kekovich and when viewed as a local sitcom it’s hard to argue that there’s anything better being made on Australia TV by people getting paid to do it. Off the back of this the Shank got tapped to be in the Big Lez Show as well as some other upcoming US animation stuff. If you’re sleeping on him, cut it out.

6. Just 2 Guyz

I don’t think it’s that necessary to go deep into why the Lonely Island are good. Just 2 Guyz was a standalone 2004 video that wound up in their failed 2005 sketch show pilot. Later that year they were all hired into Saturday Night Live. Two years after that, Hot Rod, my favourite comedy movie, comes out. I did toy with including the Stolen Footage: Jorm Dances video series in this list but those were made during SNL which disqualified them from being “for free” in my staunch opinion.

7. Laura’s Shock Attack

Sam (see: The New Pet Detectives) showed this to me and I commend its makers for at once nodding to the past with their use of French New Wave jump cuts while also being forward thinking by experimenting with unusual aspect ratios before your A24 johnny-come-lately’s like Jonah Hill and Robert Eggers ever did. Though it’s rudimentary you gotta crawl before you can walk oddly down steps (see: 40s mark).

8. This @jjjhack tweet

Half a decade late admin reveal: @jjjhack was run by Sophie Braham, Tom Cashman and myself. When we started it, Crikey wrote an article about the account’s follower rise without ever checking to see whether the followers were all eggs, which they were because I paid $60 to get 70,000 fake ones so that we aesthetically mirrored the real @triplejhack Twitter account as closely as possible. We made a pact with ourselves to only ever reply to any emails or tweets with a photo of George Rose from the Dragons which we just kind of plucked from the ether for no real reason. Highlights of the @jjjhack era were sending George Rose to Tom Tilley when he thanked us for the lols and duping Malcolm Turnbull into tagging us instead of the real account.

Again, I don’t feel grimy about sharing something I was involved in because this specific tweet was written by Tom or Soph as I quit writing on it long before they did. The three of us now do other things for fun I guess because we actually did age out of parodying the national youth broadcaster.

9. Side of Smooth

Nathan Fielder and Chris Locke in 2008, five years prior to Nathan For You.

10. Obedience

Fine, I’ll include my own proper one. I made this with Aaron Chen in 2017, it has very little sheen because the entire budget was me paying for lunch. It was knocked back by Tropfest – though I think that’s reasonable because I made it before the year’s theme of “Pineapple” was announced and then I pretended like having pine cones at the start and an apple at the end was an intentionally bookended approach to that theme, but they’d been duped one too many times.

To conclude this list in full earnestness, I wrote this sketch during one of my first ever bouts of depression, a time when I was deeply uncertain of my craft and incredibly distrustful of the local industry and the alleged experts working within it. Aaron, being the perpetually supportive friend he is, agreed to do the role and we got our friend Toby to bring his dog for Aaron to spit on. I think the sketch is pretty funny and is certainly helped to its feet through Chen being one of the most daftly captivating and to-the-core hilarious people this side of the River Murray. Through some twists and turns that reinvigorated my trust in the industry it fell into the laps of the people at Adult Swim and helped get our foot (feet?) in the door to make our short film for them last year. So yeah, it’s in the list because of how clearly it epitomises the cause-and-effect power of making your own stuff.

Remember to try to close up your gap, appreciate it when other people try to close up theirs and always revel in creating for creation’s sake!

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