If you've been reading Kitchenette for a while, you might recall that we wrote about Someone Ate This back in May. Sadly, it appears the Tumblr has shuttered, given that the last post from the site was dated September 10. Still, the end of the year seems an appropriate time to eulogize Kitchenette's 2014 Food Website of the Year.
The genius of Someone Ate This had a lot to do with the medium of its delivery. For whatever else you want to say Tumblr, it could not possibly be more perfect for this sort of short-form stick-and-move comedy. The formula was simple: horrifying picture, brief, pithy comment, and a series of hashtags that got funnier with every passing entry. The hashtags in particular deserve special note, because they achieve a lot of their comic effect through patient, hammer-like repetition: many of the hashtags within the same entry are rephrased versions of each other, and paradoxically (probably in part because of the obvious parody factor towards overabundant hashtag use on social media websites) this only serves to make them funnier.
The truly remarkable thing about Someone Ate This was that it was always such a wonderful slow burn. On page 1, you chuckled and thought maybe you'd go do something else rather than continue to look at pictures of horrifying food — yet you didn't look away. In that moment, Someone Ate This had you: by the time you got to page 3, you'd be openly cackling, and by the time you hit page 5, you were (if you're anything like me, at least) actually gasping for breath. When I first showed the website to my fiancee, she couldn't understand why I was practically asphyxiating. "This is stupid," were, I believe, her exact words. Half an hour later, after I'd gotten too lightheaded to continue and it quite literally hurt to keep laughing, she was still reading.
My comedic idols are Dave Barry, Terry Pratchett, and Rebecca Rose, writers capable of brilliant paragraphs I can still quote years and months after reading them. I mean it when I say that the people behind Someone Ate This could, using remarkably few words (many of which were some variation on "HERRRRRK GLORRRRK"), make me laugh as much as anything any of them have ever written. If brevity is the soul of wit, the minds behind Someone Ate This were its exemplars.
So take a bow, anonymous creators of Someone Ate This: you are Kitchenette's 2014 Food Website of the Year. Please, please come back; your adoring public wants more pictures of casserole disasters and crimes against cocktail weenies.
Images via Someone Ate This.