We reached out to comedy writer and published author Ariane Sherine, from the United Kingdom, for a chat about absurd, weird, and downright bizarre humor. Bored Panda wanted to get her opinion on why this sort of content appeals to some people so much.
"Certain people love anything quirky or weird and find humor in absurdity," she told us that there will always be an audience for peculiar jokes and memes.
"I’d say these people tend to be left field and eccentric themselves so they appreciate the humor in strange things," she said.
We were also interested in what content creators can do to consistently make good jokes that help them stand out from the crowd of other people doing the same thing on social media.
"Uniqueness definitely helps you stand out online," comedy expert Ariane told Bored Panda. There is a big 'but,' however.
"But there’s a flip side—being too left field can mean your jokes and memes resonate with fewer people. Another way to make sure your jokes are more likely to hit home is to make them topical."
What comedians can do is test out a few of their jokes on small audiences to check whether they've gone overboard or not. "I remember testing my jokes out on my mum before trying stand up, which was a big mistake as she and I don’t share a sense of humor!" Ariane shared.
"I’d say the only way to find out if your jokes work is to try them several times on different audiences. Yes, they might bomb but then at least you’ll know to retire them."
The ‘Obvious Plant’ project is a massive success on the internet. Jeff’s idea has become a comedic powerhouse on social media. On Instagram alone, the account has 664k followers. Meanwhile, 470k people follow the project’s Facebook page. Another 125.6k people follow Jeff’s antics on Twitter.
In short, these obviously fake products have had a pretty big impact on internet culture as a whole. Odds are that you’ve seen at least one of these ‘plants’ on your social media feeds, even if you weren’t aware of the idea behind them.
Jeff’s fake items have been seen around the internet, not just on social media networks, but also on Reddit and elsewhere.
They’ve also been widely featured in the media, and been shared by well-known celebs like Snoop Dogg, Kelly Osbourne, George Takei, and Dan Harmon. A lot of folks love the quality humor and all the effort put into the random items.
‘Obvious Plant’ started off as a Tumblr blog at the start of 2015. According to ‘Know Your Meme,’ the very first fake item that Jeff created was a ‘Wanted’ poster for people to watch him “do sick judo moves in the park.”
A few weeks after the photo of the poster got shared, Jeff officially announced the story on his website, Pleated Jeans. He then launched the project’s Facebook and Twitter pages. He followed up with an Instagram account in 2018.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can’t deny that some pranks are incredibly funny. And we feel that ‘Obvious Plant’ has found a great balance between social outrage and dark humor. Pranks and comedy work well when nobody’s ‘punching down’ with the jokes. Instead, what you get is a heavy dose of bizarreness mixed with a dash of social commentary. It’s chaotic. It’s often contextless. And it’s been making us giggle for years.
A few years ago, Jeff told Bored Panda a bit about making fake self-help book covers that he then went and planted in bookstores. “I actually got the idea while doing a different plant, Better Book Store Sections,” he revealed during an earlier interview with us.
“While scouting and putting up signs for that prank, I thought of the idea to create some funny parody books. They were up for about a day. A few people who saw them online guessed which bookstore they were at (Book Soup),” the founder of ‘Obvious Plant’ said earlier.
