10 Species of Angry Commenter You Encounter on the Web

There's no such thing as the perfect joke. For every five friends who borrow my Strangers with Candy or Mr. Show DVDs, one comes back with a bad review. Hell, I've dated two women who didn't even like Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters. I don't want to sound like a nerd, but I'll learn how to masturbate in Klingon before I put my dick in something that can't have fun watching Ghostbusters.

So I understood that when I got into this joke writing business that a few people were going to hate it, and a few of those people were going to tell me all about it. I normally write off this crushing emotional trauma as an occupational hazard, but last week I did an article on how people who play World of Warcraft suck at video games. As you can imagine, some of them took this personally. Well, I'm not ignoring it this time. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to sit around and take crap from a bunch of orcs and wizards coming into my world and talking shit.

Strangely, all hate mail writers, even ones from Warcraft, fall perfectly into one of ten categories. And all ten of those hater types were well represented in the comments section of last week's article. I've selected some of my favorites below.

Note: Legal battles have forced me to retire my Learning with Super Mario Brothers System, so we'll be using the last-minute replacement of Pac-School, Educationating the Pac-Man Way.

Detective Hypocrisy, Douchebag P.D.

The thing about the stupid is that they think they're just like you and me. As far as they know, they're clever and observant. And when they think they smell hypocrisy, they are on the case!

POD Says:

For a guy bent on putting down wow players you sure do know a thing or two about the game. Beastmaster hunters and 25 man raids: Things that players would know. Are you a dick or an Idiot?

Yes, over the course of an article desribing my experiences playing World of Warcraft you spotted that I've played it. I hope the soft spot of your skull held up to all that brain throbbing, you first term abortion. If I'd known that was going to be mysterious to the audience reading it, I would have written a coloring book about bubble gum safety and saved the complicated jokes for your dad's vaginoplasty. Like this one: Your father's birth canal is such a twisting maze of harvested colon parts that it has its own minotaur boss. Tell you what, asshole, I'll move out of my glass house when you can lift a figurative stone without giving yourself a literal hernia.

The Alien Visitor, Struggling to Understand Us

Not everyone gets why things are funny. Which is fine until they blame it on me. I seemed to be in the path of this Darcy person on the exact day he or she discovered what "humor" was.

Darcy Says:

Honestly ... more insightful and entertaining criticism comes from people who actually like the game week by week. This article could have been one sentence long and made precisely the same point, it really just seems like an excuse to use creative similes for large groups of stupid people.

A one sentence article? I don't think it'd be very responsible of me to write a comedy article that was one sentence long, star traveler. Those creative similes you mentioned are called "jokes" down here. They are one of the ways we Earth-monsters give pleasure to one another. The other is swapping genetic fluid, but I imagine anyone lucky enough to have sex with you gets to skip the unnecessary intercourse part and go straight to the weird smell in the air.

But now that you mention it, Darcy, I like your way of doing things. What it lacks in fun it makes up for inefficiency. Bruce Willis could have texted everyone "I M DEAD" and saved M. Night Shyamalan all the trouble of making that movie. Oh, and think of the printing costs Herman Melville could have saved if he'd just tweeted "my friend Ishmael won't shut up about how much he hates some fucking whale. egg salad for lunch yum!"

The Secret Rival

The Secret Rival exists in the shadows. I never actually see him, but he is my worst enemy and my most faithful reader, popping up every now and then to reassure everyone I still ruin his life. With every article he continues to read, he hates me more and further hates the world that allows me to exist. More than anything, though, he hates the taste of his giant Me poster... but he must be ready for our first kiss.

Jimmy Donahue Says:

This was a very retarded article. It's just not funny. You need to get some funny material or get the Hell outta Cracked.

It's hard to really get invested in a verbal war with people like this. I mean this kid has been working his rage up for God knows how long, and I've only had a couple sentences to catch up. Plus, I can't really tell a guy to suck my balls when he's already lurking under my toilet in a wetsuit screaming at them while I shit on him.

The Insecure Autobiographer

Sometimes when you're joking about something, it'll be seen by someone championing that cause. They have to do more than insult you. They have to tell you their life story, and what led them to be such a passionate activist.

yeradick Says:

OK First and foremost whoever wrote this article is a whinny lil baby who prolly tried playing wow but had no real skill so decided to take his bitchin to a whole new lvl and write a 3 day long post on why he is such a noob.

Look closely. The first thing the Insecure Autobiographer often does is bait you into joining him. You see how he makes wild assumptions about me that can only be contradicted by telling him all about myself and/or my Warcraft character. It should really piss him off when I instead do this: You're right, yeradick. WoW was too hard, so I sold my character to China and bought your wife a tube of asshole bleach. It says it's strong enough to work on pigs.

secondly: Why would you sit there and bash wow players with such ridiculousness when most are hard working family ppl with good jobs and a nice car , who simply like to play a game that imo has become one of the biggest in history so far...?

I think he's mostly talking to himself here. Too bad he sort of trailed off before he managed to convince himself it's okay to play so much Warcraft. You do make a good point though, yeradick. The article would have been funnier if I'd mentioned your nice car. I had a section on your happy marriage too, but it seemed too ironic to type while I was fucking your wife's sparkling alabaster asshole.

anyway i'm done, yer a douchbag and should prolly stop bein such a whinny little girl .

Trust me, I'd love to stop acting like a little whiny girl, but it's the only way your wife can get off. I think it's because deep down... she's still in love with you.

The Busy Critic

Some people can't fit reading every single comedy article into their schedule. However, they can squeeze in enough time to comment under the ones they were too busy to read, but probably would have hated.

Viddle Says:

Too long, not enough funny. Which is a shame, it -could- have been hilarious, as it stands all it does is seem to regurgitate the usual, 'fat nerds, no social skills, life wasting, endless frustration yadda yadda'. Which, to be fair have been there since the first MMOs...so it's probably some kind of indicator that nothings really changed. x)

I should have written instructions at the start of the article to warn you that the jokes work better if you read them all the way through. For example, if you don't read how you're a little bitch here at the start of this sentence, Viddle, then you'll have no idea how one tiny monkey managed to rape you here at the end of it. To you, it's some crazy, raping monkey leaping in out of nowhere without any context! You'd be like, "Aiiieee!!! Where is the joke in this horrible crime of nature!? And why does it feel so right!?"

This kind of hater is both paradoxical and totally relatable. I look at it like this: I think I hate Charlie Sheen's Two and a Half Men, and I've never seen an episode. Without seeing it, I think I hate it so much that if I saw a DVD set of Two and a Half Men in your shopping cart, I'd hate you. I'd whisper to my friends that you were going to go home and spend an evening laughing at novelty coffee mugs with Charlie Sheen and your pedestrian sense of humor. I'd follow you out of the store. I'd leave bananas and monkey pornography at every entry point of your home. I would bring that rape monkey horror into your life and I would fucking destroy you. So don't think I don't understand you, Viddle. I wrestle the same beast every day.

The Girl Who Wants to Fuck Me

For some reason, when the rare female sends hate mail, she always squeezes in a reference to her sexual organs. Is she trying to bone me? I'm not pretending to understand women, but that's the only reason I would bring mine up in a letter to a stranger, and only under the most desperate of circumstances. Take a look at one of these letters and see what you think:

Random wow player #2135135 Says:

As a wow player i'd just like to say, that the above was written in the perspective of someone who's jealous that they can't get in to a good raiding guild. This article reads as if you spent a day in Barrens around a bunch of mouthbreathers that bragged about soloing Malygos. But wtv. i'll keep getting my phat loots while you’re still trying to pug Hogger on your lvl 1 gnome twink. Oh yeah, i also have tits. Did i just blow your mind?

I don't care if you have tits, dude, I'm not your personal trainer. Sorry for thinking you were a girl at first, but seriously, why did you mention those tits in the middle of all that Warcraft nonsense? Write back soon because I could use a hand on this letter I'm working on:

"Dear Senator, your policies on animal rights are savage and inhumane. And before you write me off as some stupid chick, I have a penis. Here's a photo of it fucking some butter. Give it a name, Senator. Call to it. I NEED YOU TO PUT ME INSIDE YOU."

The Blind Shit Flinger

Some people hate the world, and your email address gets mixed up in their shitstorm for a minute. They tend to spray you with wild insults hoping to hit at least one nerve. If you happen to be small-penised, fat, bad with women and living in your parents' basement, these people will seem like sorcerers. If you're not any of those things, it just sounds like someone sent an email to the wrong person.

YourMumIsMyEpicMount Says:

Yeah fair enough and all but there are dicks,assholes,wankers, dickfaces and pervey wankshafts all over the internet and even in your fucking neighbourhood, I'm gonna go ahead and guess you are the neighbourhood fguy who is never seen leaving his house and on a rare occasion attends some sort of event, Your more than likely seen being carried in on a fucking truck.

OK, angry foreigner, if we're going to be imagining each other as things, you're the candy striper who has to wash me before I'm loaded into trucks. While you hungrily change my gigantic diaper, one of your probing sponge strokes finds the skeleton of a cat in one of the meat pockets between my armpit and seventh love handle. It was your cat, missing for weeks. In that moment you realize you never gave yourself a chance to cry. You sob like what your people call a poof, and I take a bite out of your stupid fag arm. The doctors can't save you because surprise: You were a fucking pussy the whole time.

funny stuff tho ill give you that and yeah more than enough of everything you said there is true. Love the fact that you like to describe everything and everyone who plays it as idiots and dicks which is more than partly true but then again if you sit in your house using mario bros to explain things you must be some kind of retarded or have no time on your hands.

Im assuming you must have played the game to give such a detailed account of it, If you did then that makes you a dick or a idiot (or mabye a combination of both?), if not, then why did you write about how much it annoys you? its not like your the only person who noticed the millions of twats who run around.

But yeah i applaud your work made me laugh fairly hard, And yes i am a dick, But i can admit it and i see no problem with being a dick to other dicks.

You call that being a dick? Half your insults were against people so abstract they probably don't even exist. If you want to be a real dick, you have to be specific. And while you jumped back and forth between telling me how funny I am imagining me to be morbidly obese and retarded, I was carefully compiling facts:

One, you type like someone who spent most of school in a toilet.

Two, your words have the tiny, impotent sting of someone whose asshole is considered a workout machine at the local gym.

Three, things don't seem to be going any better for you in the World of Warcraft.

The Angsty Unfunner

This is the most common of haters, and what most people picture when they picture hate mail. The Angsty Unfunner has spent too much time interacting on the Internet and has learned that thinking anything is funny is a sign of weakness. What makes him special, though, is that he tries to be funny himself. Let's take a look at this note from, sigh, PuddleofAids:

PuddleOfAids Says:

Uck.....that was tenfold cunty factor. You should publish "Learning with Super Mario - Shoving Your Dick Into a Meat Grinder". It would probably be much more entertaining and intuitive than that article. I officially stamp it: EPIC FAIL! Sorry der Chet, better luck next time.

Being funny is harder than it looks, isn't it, AIDS? Here's a fun fact: When amateur funnymen in Internet forums try to describe something they don't like with a comical analogy, there's a 63 percent chance that they're goint to put a penis into some whirling blades. I think it's because we all grew up with such bad similes in our music that our analogy centers got stifled. With lyrics like cuts like a knife, burns like fire, hungry like the wolf... we're lucky our brains can even relate two disparate concepts together.

Over the years, I've received hundreds if not thousands of emails like this, both kind and fussy, who think the secret of comedy is ground dick and MADLibs. I actually have a folder called "Cheese Weasel" that searches for emails that contain the words "cheese" or "weasel" and keeps them safely away from important ones. Those words literally appear in every stream-of-consciousness sentence that "hilarious" people have ever typed at me. You probably won't be able to use this knowledge until you start your life as an Internet writer; I'm simply letting you know that people like PuddleOfAids are miserable black holes of joy even when they're in good moods.

The Amateur Communicator

When you spend too much time away from the real world, your communication skills start to suffer. It's one of the top six reasons that when astronauts try to talk, howling black worms spin out of their mouths. The Amateur Communicator isn't usually in a situation where they have to make sense, so they don't. Please note that The Amateur Communicator might be a modified form of any of the other nine types of haters. In this case, you'll see we're dealing with a deranged form of The Insecure Autobiographer.

nolootsforthatkid Says:

heh, probably the worst piece of shit i have ever read when it comes to describing a gaming community. Written by someone who was never a part of a high quality end game raiding guild. I on the other hand am in one. We raid about 2 times a week clear everything in that one night, and that's about all i touch the game besides alts. Basically everything that is written above is about the equivalent of me busting out an article on making building a real working time machine after watching back to the future and jerking off to Einstein's photo... terrible

We all come from fps' games as well you know real ones not like halo rofl.

Great Halo joke. Your insane note had me worried that you'd lost touch with English and reality, but I'm glad you've lowered your video game intake to just beating the entire World of Warcraft twice a week, except for when you play on your other World of Warcraft characters! Pretty soon you'll have as much free time as a convicted murderer.

Now that you're back from Warcraft, I have so many questions about your journeys!

Did your body still digest food like ours, or did waste squeeze out of your pores every time you gained a level?

Did search and rescue dogs near your smell often think they'd found a dead body?

When your genitals receded to accommodate larger Big Gulps, how much horsepower did it take to yank them back to normal?

And finally, what kind of beard lice do nesting birds like best?

The Dick Mentor

When someone is disrespecting you over the Internet, they often hire themselves as your life coach. However, I always recommend caution when following the advice of the profoundly stupid.

gimpmonster Says:

Come on seanbaby...sometimes your articles lick choad. This was one of those times. What's next? Explaining intercourse using the Sims. GO get some poon

What kind of trolls are you sleeping with that you can get poon and work on your Warcraft material at the same time? Trying to juggle Warcraft jokes and women would wear me thinner than a tampon machine in a Blood Elf sorority. I'd have an easier time getting a holy paladin to level 69 while you and your brother performed it on each other. If you really need to give anyone advice, teach him how to work your balls without biting. Or better yet, choke on each other so you can at least bring some joy to some bored obituary writer.