At The Cutting Edge Of Internet Humor, Sherrod DeGrippo!
Internet humor is, arguably, an acquired taste and it is certainly dominated by youth! Because young people tend to be fickle, staying with something only so long as it is trendy, many Internet humor sites and Internet humor phenomena are not enduring. They rise up, the novelty of their form of humor captivates an audience and then the audience dissipates and the contributors go on to the next big thing. One of the real exceptions to that cycle came from the creative mind of Sherrod DeGrippo.
Sherrod DeGrippo is the creator of Encyclopaedia Dramatica and, before you go looking for it, don’t bother; Encyclopaedia Dramatica is no longer on the Internet. The site closed down in 2011, but what makes Sherrod DeGrippo so impressive is that she almost singlehandedly held together the perverse, edgy and often disturbing Encyclopaedia Dramatica for seven years. That makes Encyclopaedia Dramatica one of the biggest successes in Internet free speech and Internet humor yet.
Launched in 2004, Encyclopaedia Dramatica was the brainchild of writer and satirist Sherrod DeGrippo. DeGrippo was fascinated by how drama on Internet sites affected people in real life. As a reader and contributor on LiveJournal, DeGrippo began to notice how the interpersonal dramas of members on the site quickly escalated. Sherrod DeGrippo had the hilarious and psychologically fascinating idea to make the drama on LiveJournal the subject of a LiveJournal feed. Her gossip column quickly became popular until LiveJournal banned the gossip column.
In reaction to the banning and a breaking story that LiveJournal was a part of, Sherrod DeGrippo decided to create the ultimate First Amendment website. She created Encyclopaedia Dramatica as an anti-thesis to Wikipedia. DeGrippo encouraged the writing community of Encyclopaedia Dramatica to push the envelope of humor beyond any convention of good taste. She wanted articles that were edgy, funny and offensive. For years, Encyclopaedia Dramatica was an underground hangout for subversives in Internet subcultures that appreciated the somewhat lawless quality of the Internet.
After seven years of keeping the site on the cutting edge, DeGrippo re-evaluated the project. Going through the latest content, she found that the contributors to Encyclopaedia Dramatica were simply being repetitive, offensive without being coherent, and were producing articles that simply were not funny. Upset over the decline in quality, DeGrippo shuttered Encyclopaedia Dramatica and returned to her roots in exploring Internet interpersonal drama and a somewhat safer form of humor.
Now, Sherrod DeGrippo runs Oh Internet, a safe-for-work site dedicated to exploring everything that is on the Internet. The articles are often hilarious and under DeGrippo, Oh Internet has the potential to be another enduring Internet humor site!
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