Know Your WNFer

by ANDREW HICKS

Image by Eric Dohman.

We’re closing in on our 250th post, with 9+ months of near-daily fresh comedy under our collective belt. And now we finally own WereNotFunny.com, for at least the next year or two. So what better time to acquaint yourself with the WNF Crew? In-depth individual profiles and a multipart Ken Burns PBS documentary to follow.

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WE’RE NOT FUNNY STAFF LIST

ANDREW HICKS — Editor-in-Chief/Co-Founder

It’s not so weird that I’m writing about myself right now. I’ve been writing about myself online in one form or another since 1995. I blogged the Year in the Life of a Nerd journals before the term “blogger” existed. Then I went and got drunk for like 10 years. Then I went and met my beautiful wife and had a couple beautiful kids. Got sober, started writing again and, for the first time, got myself an ensemble of Midwest comics, essayists and regular old bantering friends and friends of friends. Started organizing and editing our various words and ideas into blog posts.

REQUIRED READING: Love Letter to Phil Collins

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T. ALLAN CHRISTOPHER — Associate Editor/Co-Founder

T. Allan, to quote the Wu Tang Clan, is “the Osiris of this shit.” No sooner had I said, “I wonder if we could get some people together and start a site where we post daily solo pieces or group conversation highlightsor whatever the F we want,” than TAC set about getting a site up and running, for us to play around with. T. Allan is an active administrative and creative presence in our Facebook material-gathering groups, he takes care of a post or two a week for me, and every now and then we get him to write us a full solo piece, when he’s not busy working on this blog or this blog. As an aside, T. Allan Christopher has formerly written under the pseudonym Woo.

REQUIRED READING: Haiku News

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J.MIZ — Creative Coordinator/Co-Founder

I’d been on Facebook for about two months when I noticed J.Miz leaving astoundingly funny top-of-her-head comments on a mutual friend’s statuses. I sent her a friend request, we started bantering, and immediately there was a symbiosis of humor, mischievous fun and shared cultural references. Facebook got five times more entertaining when I met J.Miz. Once Woo, J.Miz and I got together, the comic chemistry was intense and immediate. Keep in mind, J.Miz had never considered writing comedy or really thought she was funny. Now she constructs and spits out jokes like a one-woman one-liner factory on Twitter. She’s given our writing group all kinds of concepts and premises to work from, and she’s helped me out of more than one creative jam. J.Miz has also brought WNF a healthy handful of like-minded contributors, and she’s proven effective at squeezing solo pieces out of existing contributors.

REQUIRED READING: WTF Facebook Friends

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TONY FYLER — Twitter Editor/Senior Contributor

Fyler is a fiercely intelligent, incisively witty writer from Great Britain or Wales or Ireland or something. His areas of interest include politics, theology (particularly, lack of) and the occasional off-the-wall food, sex or miscellaneous sociological joke. Oh, and he also fronted the money for our WereNotFunny.com domain, after I procrastinated and made excuses about being broke. Fyler’s not getting a penny of that $19 back, either.

REQUIRED READING: Devil’s Guide to the 21st Century

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MICHELLE DEE — Facebook Fan Page Editor/Senior Contributor

Mrs. Woo has been around since the beginning and has possibly posted more WNF links to Facebook than anyone on this list. Around 28 percent of times the “share” button is clicked on Facebook, Michelle Dee is the culprit. Michelle recruited WNF staple contributors Fyler, Allison Stein and Eve Ventrella. She also runs our Facebook fan page, so next time you see the word “afraid” spelled with two F’s in your news feed, address your letter of complaint to Michelle Dee. Who will write you back within three business days with the one-word response, “Haytchoo” and an ASCII-text middle finger.

ಠ_ಠ

Required Reading: Possession 101

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ERIC DOHMAN — Senior Contributor

Dohman distinguished himself in the WNF group immediately upon being discovered and added by J.Miz. Not everyone knows how to take Eric, and others think he traffics too heavily in dick and poop jokes. To me, Dohman is a solid, insightful, even innovative comic voice on most every topic he touches. High brow, medium brow, low brow and lower brow. Dohman also has graphic skills and has come through with the (still too few) image assignments we’ve given him. “But Andrew,” you say, “I thought you steal all your art straight from Google Image.” Well, that’s mostly true, but we’re gonna lean on Dohman more and more heavily in the very near future. He just doesn’t know it yet.

REQUIRED READING: Santorum Shit Bags

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ANNE GARDNER — Senior Contributor

Anne is a lady whose path I crossed briefly at the age of 18 and reunited with thanks to the magic of Facebook. She’d leave a sarcastic comment here or there on my statuses, and when WNF came into being, I invited her into the group. A.G. has maintained a presence ever since, contributing one-liners to group pieces and writing her own solo articles. And she has an infant at home and everything.

REQUIRED READING: Facebook-Baked Glee

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ERTEL GRAY — Senior Contributor

I found Ertel via Facebook one day while bored and searching for an old Dana Carvey SNL sketch called “Lyle, the Effeminate Heterosexual.” Ertel had posted the video on his wall at some point. I friended him on the basis of that alone, but I had no idea how completely and instantaneously Ertel would fit in with the WNF Crew. Funny dude, Ertel Gray, and I think he knows even more obscure ’80s and ’90s pop culture than even I do.

REQUIRED READING: Reg Strikes Back

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PAUL LAO — Senior Contributor

Paul lives in California, so we almost always publish whatever he sends us.

REQUIRED READING: 9 Demons of the College House Party

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There are a dozen other current contributors I rely on for material. Many of them are Illinois comedians — Andrew Cline, C.J. Dodd, James Draper, Scotty Harris, Ryan Krause, Probably Matt Linville, K.B. Marion, Drift Roberts, Saracakes (who also spent many hours legitimizing WNF’s Twitter feed) and Emily Toops. Another, Lola Tucker, joined our ranks after reading and enjoying the WNF blog.

Two others — Buddah Eskew and Inscrutable JeffRey Trotter — are no longer writing for We’re Not Funny but have some great stuff scattered throughout our archives. I also want to thank Saracakes for her many hours of work editing and posting to our Twitter feed.

I want to thank everyone mentioned above for loaning us some of their time and creativity. And thank YOU for reading.

WNF 101

You've found it! We're Not Funny, a comedy blog written by a group of writers, comedians and friends. We have nearly 300 original comedy posts here. To begin reading and enjoying, click the logo on the top of this page.

So you’re new to reading the WNF website? Or you want to revisit a favorite old  post? Here are a few quick ones to consider:

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WNF Beers

Eight new parody beer labels from the WNF Macrobrewery.

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Catching Up With the Caught

“To Catch a Predator: Where Are They Now? Edition”

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12 Words Come Out of Closet

SOHO, NEW YORK — A dozen English language words, ranging from the commonly used “Under” and “Pitcher” to the more obscure “Catcher” and “Obscure,” stood onstage together at a press conference Monday to announce that they are gay.

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Klan Kalls It Kwits

With membership down, the KKK re-brands its image.

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Cleanup in Aisle 6

Ever view your trip through the supermarket checkout lane as your five minutes to perform for a captive audience of one?

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Paired Facebook Likes

When you click “like” on two different Facebook pages, Facebook runs an announcement on your friends’ newsfeeds, with those items listed as a pair. (EX. Andrew Hicks likes Obesity and Big Macs.”) These are some classic actual examples.

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My 5 Most Abused Forms of Alcohol

WNF co-founder and editor in chief Andrew Hicks, who spent a decade as a monster lush, looks back on his time spent with beer, wine, vodka, whiskey and tequila, in that order.

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Know Your WNFer

Get to know the founders and senior contributors of We’re Not Funny, some of whom are no longer with us. (By which we mean, they left the group. They’re not dead. That we know of.)

Coming Soon to WNF

by ANDREW HICKS and WE’RE NOT FUNNY

First rule of fake coupons: Don't superimpose the word "FAKE" in huge blue letters. It's a dead giveaway.

We’re Not Funny recently completed its first six months of publication. That’s 150+ posts, 30+ contributors and, I dunno, a dozen scattered, polite laughs from our readership. Now that we’re established as an Internet comedy magazine to be reckoned with, it’s time to move onward and upward with new features to keep website visitors coming back again and again.

Here are just a few of the improvements you can expect from the second half of the first year of the WNF website.

• Pre-Filled New York Times Crossword Puzzle. Scan in a sample of your handwriting, email it to us, and each day’s puzzle will arrive in PDF, already appearing to have been filled out in pen with absolutely no mistakes. Impress your family, friends and, actually, no one at all.

• Fake coupons to your favorite stores and restaurants that look like the real thing. Have the shopping or dining experience of your life by whipping out “100% Off” and “Buy Zero, Get Six Free” coupons.

• J.Miz‘s Pornographic Origami Cutout Corner.

• Weather With Woo, 5-Day Forecast. (“Sunday — open your fucking window and see for yourself; Monday — open your fucking window and see for yourself; Tuesday — open your fucking window and see for yourself; Wednesday — open your fucking window and see for yourself; Thursday — chance of rain.”)

• WNF Personals, with profiles of over 5,000 “hot chicks” who are all secretly Buddah Eskew.

• “Who the Freak is Ertel Gray: A 200-Part Editorial.”

• Andrew Hicks combines his best jokes into the new column Obscure Pop Culture References No One Fucking Gets.