“Oh, wait.  That’s the joke?  They’re just making shit up?  That’s stupid.  That’s so fucking stupid.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt upon reading an nbc.com.co article

Listen, America.  We’re going to have to sit down and have a little chat. In a world where thousands of people constantly assume that The Onion is real, it’s really important that we know what we’re doing when we’re trying to bring satire into people’s lives.  So while it’s hilarious for us to see someone stumble across a satirical article and go into a mouth-foaming rage about, say, 22,000 Polar Bears having to live on the Earth’s one remaining iceberg, there are a lot of lazy writers out there that see your standard Clickholes or Borowitz Report and think, “Hey I can do that!  All I have to do is make up fake stories, right?”

Obviously, there’s much more to satire than just making up stories, and there’s definitely much more to satire than making up stories with the express hope that people actually think it’s real.  It’s like when that asshole acquaintance of yours on Facebook posts an article about Firefly getting rebooted, only to take you to a “YOU GOT PRANKED!” page right after you clicked the link (and shortly before you unfriended said acquaintance on Facebook).  There’s nothing particularly clever about that, and there’s definitely nothing satirical going on.  It’s just stupid.

We recently saw one of these stupid websites in an article titled “Yelp Sues South Park For $10 Million Over Latest Episode.”  Now, that seemed possibly a bit far-fetched, but we clicked the link because we saw it was NBC.  “Huh, wait, so this is posted on the NBC website?  That seems…huh.”  As we read it, increasingly thinking, “Wait…this can’t be a real story” we finally noticed that the website wasn’t nbc.com.  It was nbc.com.co.  Because the internet is fucking stupid.  And we are here to review it.

AFFotD Website Review:  NBC.com.co

Nbc.com.co is a stupid, lazy, dumb website.  We say this as a staff that spends most of our time going to a variety of stupid, lazy, and dumb websites, while submitting our own stupid, lazy, and dumb Wikipedia-rewording contributions to the internet on a weekly basis.

But nbc.com.co represents a new level of internet idiocy.  If nbc.com.co were a person, he’d be that guy you went to elementary school with who would go to you and say, “Hey, they’re out of milk for lunch” and when you say, “Huh, really?” he’d just shout, “No, not really!  IDIOT!” before just cackling like a fucking jackass.  Nbc.com.co is run by that cackling jackass, all grown up, but we’ll get to that later.

For example, that poorly headered Bill Murray article that we screenshotted from their front page?  That was written on October 13^th, 2015 and the “joke” of the article is, as far as we can tell, is “People like Bill Murray.  Let’s lie and say he performed the Heimlich Maneuver on somebody.”

They actually made the effort to make a fake video that they put at the end of the article, to really try to suck you in to the “hilarious” joke that Bill Murray did a thing. They include an out of context shot of a Bill Murray interview where he talks about “staying alert” and then tossed in about seven references (and links) to the Phoenix restaurant “The Lost Leaf” where the “event” (read as “lie”) “happened” (read as “this is fucking stupid”).

It’s wrong and bad and stupid and dumb, and the writer of that article should feel bad if they ever for a moment thought that they were succeeding in being funny.  Especially when you look at the rest of their front page.

Are you fucking shitting us?  So, two months before that “comedy gem” of an article about Bill Murray saving the life of someone in Phoenix, we got the “shocking but true” story of Bill Murray saving the life of a child in London.

Which in turn, came just a fucking month after another goddamn article about Bill Murray stopping a robbery in Phoenix.

At this point in our research process for this article (read as: halfway through our bottle of whiskey), we’ve managed to figure out that the guy running this site is from Phoenix, so to the residents of that fair city, we want to make something very clear.

This is not funny. If you do not do anything to distance yourself from the fucking psychopath running this site, we will be forced to assume that Phoenix is the least funny city in America. The ball is in your court, something must be done, nbc.com.co must be stopped.

Oh, and by the way, we actually know who runs this bullshit, thanks to the fact that the second Bill Murray in Phoenix article also out of fucking nowhere plugs The Lost Leaf, and specifically something called The Mystery Show, which is very clearly the shitty comedy show done by the mouthbreather that runs this site.

Seriously, read this pitch for the show “Bill Murray” gave, and tell us that it’s not the most depressingly desperate attempt at self promotion you’ve ever seen.

Jesus Christ, guy, at least have some sense of self-respect. Someone sat down in front of a computer, and actually thought, and then deemed acceptable, to type out and publish, a sentence basically saying, “Man, I really want to see these ‘comics’ who are not me and my friends, said Bill Murray a famous actor who I really like” and now it’s there, on the internet, draining IQ points every second eyeballs are forced to rest on their page.

By the way, if you clicked the link for that show they’re plugging, you’ll find a minimum of four painfully bad joke attempts and a character named “fappy the anti-masturbation dolphin” which, hey, we get it, we watched Conan in the early 2000s too, but come on man.

Another “hilarious” gag that this site always tries to pull off is fake articles about shows being rebooted, or movies getting sequels. The above Breaking Bad whopper, for example, also comes with a video announcing the “news” complete with “guy trying to talk in a fake low register which inevitably makes him sound like a muffled 12-year-old pretending to be an adult” narration.

And hey, if you’re one of those “perfectionists” who “thinks that making shit up at best only qualifies as like, one third of what you have to do to build a joke” well clearly you haven’t heard the doozy about how they’re making a sequel to Fight Club! Get it?! Because it’s a movie that Paul Horner watched when he was in high school that he liked!

Oh, also, yeah, if you’re actually curious who’s behind this bullshit, we’ve made allusions to some hidden force of fuckwits, but actually we do know who runs it.

Paul Horner of Phoenix, Arizona is a comedian in the way that your high school-aged cousin with a lot of Instagram followers is a “photo journalist” or the way that our staff members are sex-with-Cindy-Crawford-specialists. You can call yourself anything on the internet, but until we see some proof that you’ve told an actual joke once in your life, we’re just going to describe you as a pompous douchebag.

We get it, Paul, you’re into cupcake ipsum dolor sit and love love cake, that describes practically EVERYONE, keep it to your FUCKING SELF

Paul Horner is full of shit, and we say that as a publication who claims that our editor-in-chief is named Johnny Roosevelt and then had him run for President in actual real life.  Nbc.com.co only has a dozen articles or so, all written by “Darius Rubics” which is a pseudonym used by Horner.

We understand why he’d write under a pseudonym, considering he spends his time posting pedantic fake news stories less subtle and subversive than a properly executed “got your nose” bit.

Unfortunately, he also views it as a way to…well, just read the bio he (clearly) wrote about himself in the third person.

Before we devolve into a sea of swear words about this guy, his face, his stupid face, and how much we want to punch his stupid face, let’s talk about the waste of chromosomes behind nbc.com.co.

Paul Horner used to be the lead writer for National Report, another bullshit website we won’t link to. You might have heard of that particular fake news outlet, since it is about as bad as nbc.com.co only bigger and thus, a bigger stain on our nation.

They posted a series of fake Ebola articles that caused a bit of panic, and basically go out of their way to tell you that they’re not trying to be funny or satirical, they’re just trying to trick you into clicking their site.

He’s since been fired from the site, to which we say boo-fucking-hoo, and started his new venture, newsexaminer.net.

As far as we can tell, nbc.com.co is essentially a somewhat incomplete mirror for that new site. This is the site that is responsible for creating the fake videos to add “credence” to the fake articles, and you know that they’re great because each video sounds like it was recorded in the closet that a 16-year-old boy masturbates in, and has about four times more down votes than up votes.

Paul Horner made this and put it on the article he wrote about himself, because Super Troopers is one of his favorite movies, because of course it fucking is.

Paul Horner takes pride in his fake stories that people believe are real, but the stories that he brags about the most reveal how much of a fucking psychopath he is.

The two articles he seems most proud of are, and we’re not making this up, an article where he claims to be fucking Banksy, and another article about how he, Paul Horner, has the world’s largest penis.

He (probably paid) to have it be the top Google search for “biggest penis in the world” just so he could take a snapshot of it while saying “it was on the internet, so it must be true!” By the way, look at that snapshot again. The motherfucker +1’d it himself! That might not be the saddest thing a person with a small penis could do, but it’s definitely in the top five. Actually, let’s craft a list.

5 Saddest Things a Person With a Small Penis Could Do

5:  Put up a mortgage on your house in order to buy a Ferrari with the vanity plate “B1gJunk”

4:  Get really into sending unsolicited dick picks to randomly generated phone numbers

3:  Celebrate your birthday with a cake for yourself, and a massive second cake that says “THE BIRTHDAY BOY DOES NOT HAVE A SMALL PENIS NO MATTER WHAT JILLIAN TELLS YOU.”

2:  Spend an entire week at your parent’s house, screaming, “You did this, it’s because of your genes that I’m small down there” while sobbing uncontrollably.

1:  Write an article about how you have the world’s largest penis, +1 the article, and take a snapshot of it appearing on a Google search

Huh, apparently we were wrong.  It was the saddest thing a person with a small penis could do.

…O…kay?

We don’t want to pile on Paul Horner too much, because we feel like we’re going to have to write about him again at some point down the line, so we’ll just close off this website review with one of the many pages on nbc.com.co that clearly was never finished.

Nbc.com.co is the website equivalent of your three-year-old nephew saying “Knock knock….ELEPHANT” and giggling maniacally, except that the knock knock elephant joke actually can be kind of funny if you’re high enough.

Nbc.com.co, and by extension that bullshit News Examiner site, is stupid, wrong, and dumb.  If you told us that they employed thousands of orphans who would starve to death if the site went under, we would shrug, say, “Well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet” and would (hire someone to) DoS the shit out of those soon to be dead kids’ livelihoods.

Paul Horner, if you’re reading this. You’re doing the internet wrong, and the concept of a masturbating dolphin has been done long before you decided to spend money on that fucking costume, and has been done much better. You’re a hack, shut up, you’re making us actual internet writers with artificially inflated senses of self-worth look bad.

2020 Editorial Update:

After Trump’s election in 2016, Paul Horner took credit for Trump’s election. But, in 2017, at the age of 39, he was found dead in his home, likely from the misuse of prescription drugs. There’s not really a joke to be made here. On one hand, any death is a tragedy, and should be handled as such.

However, how you live your life determines how you are written about in your death. As such, we’re making an acknowledgement here…while not changing any of our descriptors of this man that we wrote while he was among the living.