Who are your 5 favorite web comedians

[Srelex]

Chuck, Spoony, James Rolfe, the aforementioned Agonybooth, Benzaie, and maybe to a lesser extent Linkara, even if his videos don't make me laugh as much as they used to.

Now, while I disagree with some of Spoony's opinions and find some of his written reviews and vlogs just painful, he does succeed in making me grin a lot of the time. James Rolfe can be hit and miss as the nerd, but just reviewing as himself, he's one of the less pretentious, more level-headed reviewers out there who restrains from going into all-out whining like some others. His review of the Star Wars films as a whole are something I liked.

Oh, and fuck RLM. He may make a few good points, but fuck his voice and fuck his 'humor'. Same goes for the TDW/AA: I used to find him slightly amusing, but no more, and his voice sounds ever more stoned with every video.

EDIT:As for Yahtzee, while he can be a bit of a jackass as a person, I do manage to refrain myself from taking most of his videos seriously, which is the best way to view them, and they're funnier that way.

[aerius]

Joe Rogan wins by default since he's the only one I follow. Sometimes it's totally silly shit like the time he had Mayhem Miller on his show and his co-host proved that a dog won't bite you if you make it sniff your shit, and sometimes he makes you think, he explained why Twilight is fucking ridiculous because why would a 300 year old vampire want to date a 16 year old girl?

[2000AD]

3 pages in and no love for Ask A Ninja? The Ninja is looking forward to killing you all soon.
I also like the Know Your Meme team over at the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.

[Night_stalker]

1. Nostalgia Critic

2. Randall Munroe (XKCD)

3. David Morgan-Mar (Irregular Webcomic)

4. Brian Clevinger (8-Bit Theatre)

5. Chris Doucette (The Last Days of FOXHOUND)

[adam_grif]

Oh, I forgot about web comics.

XKCD is #1 or #2 in that case. Basic Instructions is also a great comic.

[Zor]

1-Nostalgia Critic
2-Spoony
3-Chuck
4-Linkara
5-The Nostagia Chick

Yahtzee is pretty good, but the fact of the matter is that he does give off a bit too much Bile. His Extra Punctuation text articles are quite enjoyable.

A Honorable mention goes out to AronRa. He does have good Comedy in his refutatation of Creationist Nonsense, but thats sort of a sidenote

Also am going to go out and say that i FUCKING HATE RedLetterMedia.

Zor

[Kingmaker]

In no particular order: Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (Penny Arcade), Noah Antwiler (the Spoony Experiment), Howard Taylor (Schlock Mercenary), Yahtzee (Zero Punctuation), LoadingReadyRun Crew.

On the Nostalgia Critic: he certainly has his moments, but the space between them has gotten further and further. He's also gotten increasingly shrill as a way of compensating for the lack/recycling of jokes in his reviews. I actually find some of the other stuff Doug Walker does (i.e. bum reviews) to be much funnier and he seems to be capable of producing decent reviews of not-awful movies (see his old vs new stuff) when he tries.

[Jim Raynor]

I don't spend much time watching these "web comedians," though I've liked Linkara. I saw some of Angry Video Game Nerd's videos and thought he was good; he gets really "angry" although it's clearly an act and he picks the most deserving of targets (such as Superman 64).

I've criticized RLM harshly before, while stating that I would be working on a response to his work. After going through his famed review of TPM point-by-point, I'm more convinced that he's full of it than ever. The vast majority of what he says is crap or exaggeration (which turned my response into a long term project that I'm still working on). adam_grif stated earlier that he thought RLM was funny even when he was wrong. I have no problem with that opinion. What I have a problem with is when people say that his reviews are intelligent or insightful, because they're not.

This isn't about liking TPM (I myself find it the weakest of the SW series), but about whether he intelligently discusses things that can clearly be seen onscreen. For example he spends two minutes bitching about the Royal Starship's shields being shot through, as if shields in a scifi movie are some kind of difficult concept. Then he claims that the scene is pointless because the ship isn't shot again after R2 repairs the shields, when in fact the visuals clearly show it being shot more than once. At another point he pretends that Qui-Gon's negotiations with Watto were completely convoluted and incomprehensible, obnoxiously carrying on for another two minutes while pretending to be completely mindscrewed. The actual scene was straightforward and easy to understand. His review is full of things like that. Things that don't even pertain to the movie's structure or execution, but are rather discussions of fact about what actually happened onscreen. Those things can be determined in a clear cut fashion, and he's frequently wrong. And whenever he touched on various tangent subjects, be they military tactics, politics, or ethics, his points were often shockingly stupid.

It's crap like that which padded out his review to 70 minutes. He was much more on the ball when he stayed to more sensible (also less nitpicky and exaggerated) criticisms such as pointing out how the movie lacked a classic protaganist or how the final battle didn't have as much in the way of emotional stakes. I don't think many people would argue with that. Of course those points come at the beginning and the end of his bloated review.

[Phantasee]

What was wrong with Superman 64? It always seemed like a game worth playing.

[Darth Yan]

crappy camera and controls, a lot of mist to cover the fact that they were too damn lazy to do any real designs, and a shit ending after all the torment.

NC still has moments (the pebble and penguin review was certainly funny)

[adam_grif]

What was wrong with Superman 64? It always seemed like a game worth playing.

I don't believe you have ever played Superman 64, and if you did, then you must have been like 5 years old to think that.

Right off the bat, it has abysmal graphics with the always hilarious "Kryptonie Fog" covering up the 50 meter draw distance. The flight controls are hopeless, the objectives are pointless, and the game is about as fun as driving spikes through your fingernails.

[Phantasee]

I never got to play it, but I remember reading a bunch of reviews of it in magazines back then, and my two "want to play" N64 games were Superman 64 and the Judge Dredd one.

Should I be surprised video game reviews were worthless back then too?

[General Zod]

Since I don't think anyone's bothered mentioning it now that we're throwing out webcomics too, I'm going to go ahead and mention Oglaf for having some of the most hilarious filthy comic strips out there.

[Srelex]

I never got to play it, but I remember reading a bunch of reviews of it in magazines back then, and my two "want to play" N64 games were Superman 64 and the Judge Dredd one.

Should I be surprised video game reviews were worthless back then too?

There was a Judge Dredd game for N64?

[RedImperator]

I never got to play it, but I remember reading a bunch of reviews of it in magazines back then, and my two "want to play" N64 games were Superman 64 and the Judge Dredd one.

Should I be surprised video game reviews were worthless back then too?

I can't imagine even the most shameless shill giving Superman 64 a good review. Even if the controls weren't awful and the graphics weren't hideous, the whole fucking concept was boring. "Superman flies around performing stunts." It was almost like they started out making a Pilotwings knockoff or something, and then changed it to a Superman game later.

I'll admit it's not a serious site. It does get some things right, and is just plain fun to read. they try to be funny, and the if viewed as a funny site with a decent analysis of the bare bones of story telling (not story telling as a whole) they tend to be ok.

Oh God, no. That's not the bare bones of storytelling. The bare bones of storytelling are 1) protagonist has a goal, 2) protagonist encounters obstacles on the way to that goal, 3) protagonist is changed in some way by the pursuit of that goal. TVTropes tries (seriously or not) to categorize all the protagonists, obstacles, goals, and changes in, as near as I can tell, every work of fiction in every medium that some Internet nerd liked at some point, but it doesn't do any real analysis and doesn't offer any insight into how stories work. Claiming tropes are the "bare bones" of fiction is like claiming cornices and pilasters are the "bare bones" of architecture.

What's worse, it presents these tropes out of context, with just long lists of examples with no discussion, so you're just left with "Face Heel Turn" or "Crowning Moment of Dumb Nerd Bullshit" or whatever without any gaining any understanding of anything. That's beyond the most fundamental structural issue of the site: tropes are defined by other tropes. That's why the thing is such a time sink--half the articles don't make any sense unless you follow the links down the rabbit hole. Which is fine for a website designed to waste time, but shitty for anything that has pretensions of being a "resource"; even Wikipedia generally tries to keep articles self-contained. Add to that the sheer number of tropes, God knows how many of which are dubious, and you have a site that's fun if you're bored but useless if you're trying to better understand narrative fiction.

This is all without commenting on the content of the articles, because really, they could be the most insightful, brilliantly written articles in the world, but the way the site is structured, it's not much use.

[adam_grif]

I never got to play it, but I remember reading a bunch of reviews of it in magazines back then, and my two "want to play" N64 games were Superman 64 and the Judge Dredd one.

Should I be surprised video game reviews were worthless back then too?

Superman 64 was notable as being one of the worst received games of all time, critically. If you really did read a good review in a magazine, it must have been the only one in the whole world.

But while I'm here:




AVGN on the game.