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The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Aidan Jones: the 10 funniest things I have ever seen (on the internet)
The internet gets a lot of bad press, most of which is itself published on the internet, which does seem hypocritical. The complaints usually mourn a loss of innocence and freedom. They remember the way things used to be, before the digital world was conquered by a handful of infinitely powerful tech oligarchs. I remember when we first got broadband in 2005. I felt like one of F Scott Fitzgerald's Dutch sailors at the end of The Great Gatsby, 'face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder'. It's scary to think that this beautiful thing has been stolen and turned against us. Used to extract the very minutes of our lives, which are then sold for profit. Some think that we should switch it off, shut the whole thing down before we lose touch with what's real, and who we are. But is it really so wrong to stay just a little bit longer? These are the 10 funniest things I have ever seen on the internet. This is the first standup special I ever remember watching. I always loved this bit about how hangovers get worse as you get older, which is so funny to me now because I'd never been drunk when I first saw this. Now I'm in my 30s, but I've been sober for 6 years, so you could argue that I still don't really get it. But I love the bit now for the same reason I did when I was 13: the violent way he says, 'SHUT UP!' In high school I was friends with these two brothers who lived on my street. Their dad was an illustrator and loved the Beatles, and their mum would take carloads of us out to the hills to film gory slasher movies that they wrote and produced together. They introduced me to so much indie film and weird art that felt a world away from suburban Adelaide and as weird as Brad Neely's overdub of the entire first Harry Potter film is, it's also just the tip of the iceberg. As an aside, one of the brothers, Pirie Martin, is a film-maker in his own right now and his first feature Psychosis was released in 2023 and absolutely rules. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Speaking of the Beatles! James Donald Forbes McCann, as he insists on being referred to, was one of the best comedians in Australia for years and no one cared. Then he started opening for Shane Gillis and moved to the US, and now he rightfully sells tickets everywhere he goes. I could have just as easily put his 'Fool Me Once' bit on this list, but I can't go past this poem about the Beatles. It's the age-old question: who is the best Beatle? For me, this poem settles it for good. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Andrew Portelli is currently one of the best comedians in Australia and no one cares. But the game is long, and the world will have its justice. 5. Group X – Waffle House My friend Lucy and I still quote this video and I'd say it might even be one of the cornerstones of our 15-year friendship, along with 'Let's get some SHOES!' and a house mixtape called Midyear Mayhem that my friend Mebbo released in 2009. How about that MS Word-era gradient in the animation! Phenomenal. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. These two hosts of Triple J breakfast – along with guest comedian Alex Ward – take turns saying nice things to each other, and then reacting with the smallest possible smile. You will not believe how much fun this is until you do it with your loved ones. After you're done laughing at that, appreciate the beautiful irony of a breakfast radio team posting an entirely visual gag to their Instagram. When I moved to Melbourne in 2012, David Quirk was the first comic I ever shared a bill with whose work I was already familiar with. I loved this set from Festival Club, and there is no better summary of what comedians do than his quip, 'All I do is participate in life, and report back.' Watching Quirk emcee the open mic at The Monastery in Richmond to four punters in 2012 was an incredible thrill, and also served as great preparation for how the next decade-plus of my life would look. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. This account seems to have gone relatively quiet in the last few years, but in my mid-to-late 20s it was huge. It's a girl from Manchester who collects and shares screenshots of the insane things men say to women on the internet. When it blew up I was just beginning to reckon with the idea that the repeated failure of all of my romantic endeavours might partially be my fault. (SURELY NOT?!) Reading these posts always made me laugh, but contained within them was also the helpful subtext: 'Hey you! Yeah you. Don't be an asshole.' This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Blake Freeman is one of the most natural performers I've ever seen. When we met I was 21 and he was 16 and even then he had an unnatural wisdom about him, which is funny because his act is all about how he's dumb. He's not dumb, he's lying to you, don't listen to him! This bit he did for the Melbourne comedy festival gala this year is unbelievable. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. I don't buy into the fatalist idea that the internet is this awful thing that is ruining our lives. Sure there are bad aspects, just like everything, but the internet is really just us, reflected back at ourselves. If we don't like what we see, it's up to us to change it. Train the algorithm to show you the kind of content you want to see, and reward the kind of creation you want to reward. It starts with you, right here, right now. With this video of a simple man transforming into a cat. Aidan Jones is a standup comedian. His show Chopin's Nocturne is at Summerhall for the Edinburgh fringe from 31 July to 25 August. Follow him on Instagram
Mail & Guardian
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
We must all reclaim our information space
Elon Musk. (File photo) More South Africans arrived in the United States this week. But it is an old resident who made the most headlines. Elon has left the Doge office. He did so in bizarre pomp and ceremony, with Donald Trump looking to save both their faces with a predictably awkward golden key award ceremony. Musk and his Javier Milei-inspired chainsaw are no longer a factor in Washington. The same cannot be said for public life. Musk owns X/Twitter, one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. He's had a huge following on it long before he took control in 2022. He relishes using that influence to peddle all manner of absurdity and falsity. Musk has been the figurehead of the open conspiracy of tech oligarchs that reign in the White House. They have made no secret of their willingness to do whatever is asked of them, knowing that the reciprocation will be ample (or indeed, the punitive repercussions for a failure to toe the line would be grave.) Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg's sycophantic about-turn on moderation was a perfect example of that reality playing out in real time. In that now infamous announcement video, he waxed lyrical about how he created Facebook to be a democratic marketplace of free ideas. That is a lie, of course. He created Facebook so college boys could rate women on the internet. Regardless, with other media and search engine owners included in the cohort, the fact remains that a few powerful men control the dominant means of creating and sharing information in 2025. Those white South Africans arriving as refugees in the US should be all the reminder we need of how pernicious a narrative can be; and that real-world consequences need not be grounded in truth or rational reasoning. It bears repeating: there is no white genocide in South Africa. It is imperative that we, as individual news consumers and practitioners, reclaim our information space. For as much as the oligarchs strut with the swagger of impunity, that is far from the case. While this would be an obvious segue into launching into a pitch to get you to subscribe, the struggle we face goes beyond promoting ideas of established media. There's a war going on for our attention. The mistake would be in thinking we have to take sides. We have to respect each other and the process of sharing ideas civilly, with a respect for the truth. If our engagement begins and ends with a retweet, our society will begin to look even bleaker. The algorithm only wins if you surrender to it.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
From the Creator of ‘Succession,' a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right
In November, when the 'Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, 'Mountainhead,' he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump's inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiers on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, 'a feeling of nowness.' He's succeeded. Much of the pleasure of 'Mountainhead' is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains. No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day's news cycle. But art can help; it's not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy. In 'Mountainhead,' three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger-on they call Souper, short for 'soup kitchen,' because he's a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic, juvenile Venis — the richest man in the world — has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deepfakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes or desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internecine violence turns into apocalyptic global instability. It's not a far-fetched premise. Facebook posts accusing Muslims of rape have already helped fuel a genocide in Myanmar, and tools like those that Venis unleashes seem more likely to be months than years away. Venis's foil is Jeff, who has built an A.I. that can filter truth from falsehood and whose flashes of conscience put him at odds with the others. Rounding out the quartet is Randall, a venture capitalist — played by a terrific Steve Carrell — who pontificates like the bastard offspring of the investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. As the planet melts down, they start fantasizing about taking over 'a couple of failing nations' and running them like start-ups. 'We intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto network states, populations love it, and it snowballs,' says Randall. But as the global crisis spirals and the dread specter of regulation appears, their ambitions expand. The group seems to have a good relationship with the unnamed president, but they also regard him as an idiot. After the president chastises Venis, they start thinking about replacing him. Given the administration's 'wobbles,' Venis asks, 'do we just get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up and coup out the U.S.?' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
