FPP titles that made you smile or laugh October 21, 2014 7:59 AM Subscribe
One of the more splendid attributes of the MetaFilter community is the regular ability of MeFites to write titles of posts that are offbeat, witty, hilarious or smart. A few recent ones I've enjoyed include this and this. While Y(humor)MMV, what post titles have you particularly enjoyed?
Still a big fan of Iridic's What Fresh El is This?
posted by phunniemee at 9:37 AM on October 21, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by phunniemee at 9:37 AM on October 21, 2014 [3 favorites]
I work in academic publishing and I think it sometimes spills into my everyday life. Like the time I titled an encyclopedic post about the various bad productions of the Wizard of Oz rip-off, Babes in Toyland: Severe Head Trauma in Midwestern Adolescent Girls and the Decline of the American Musical. That's probably my favorite among my own posts.
posted by Toekneesan at 10:59 AM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Toekneesan at 10:59 AM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
This one is probably the Platonic ideal of headlines.
posted by backseatpilot at 11:20 AM on October 21, 2014 [5 favorites]
posted by backseatpilot at 11:20 AM on October 21, 2014 [5 favorites]
I like the title of my FPP on Brooklyn's 19th century swill milk scandals: Udderless Brooklyn.
posted by MonkeyToes at 11:26 AM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by MonkeyToes at 11:26 AM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
I mostly just do pull quotes, but I did like: Have you heard about the new corduroy pillows?
posted by Chrysostom at 11:49 AM on October 21, 2014
posted by Chrysostom at 11:49 AM on October 21, 2014
I have to admit I was really pleased when I came up with this one: This is what happens when you take the blue pill *and* the red pill.
I'll have to look through my favorites because I know I marked a few just for the titles.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:17 PM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
I'll have to look through my favorites because I know I marked a few just for the titles.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:17 PM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
The problem is that the title is the only part of the post to hit the RSS feed, so I don't try to be excessively clever in my titles.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:30 PM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:30 PM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
Depends on your reader, maybe? I see full posts with Newsblur.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:43 PM on October 21, 2014
posted by Chrysostom at 3:43 PM on October 21, 2014
I really liked this FPP title by Mitheral:
|/
Minimalist. Clever. And incredibly restrained.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:14 PM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
|/
Minimalist. Clever. And incredibly restrained.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:14 PM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
Then you have this spider FPP by elgilito which is a stroke of genius:
°oOOo°
I'm going to point to this one I did because I was really chuffed when I thought of it:
■ ■ ■ ■
(It took me a while to find out what worked for that.)
And I'm pointing to this comment by Room 641-A because its damned creative - it's within a FanFare thread about "The Strain":
:{€~~~~~~<>
(I tried to add it as a tag but alas, does not work. Looks plenty Ascii to me but whatevs.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:23 PM on October 21, 2014 [3 favorites]
°oOOo°
I'm going to point to this one I did because I was really chuffed when I thought of it:
■ ■ ■ ■
(It took me a while to find out what worked for that.)
And I'm pointing to this comment by Room 641-A because its damned creative - it's within a FanFare thread about "The Strain":
:{€~~~~~~<>
(I tried to add it as a tag but alas, does not work. Looks plenty Ascii to me but whatevs.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:23 PM on October 21, 2014 [3 favorites]
The larch. The larch. The larch.
[more inside]
16.7704, -3.0057
posted by unliteral at 10:00 PM on October 21, 2014 [3 favorites]
[more inside]
16.7704, -3.0057
posted by unliteral at 10:00 PM on October 21, 2014 [3 favorites]
Delightful:
~~~~(;,,;)~~~~
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:07 PM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
~~~~(;,,;)~~~~
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:07 PM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
(Second one by Fizz - must like 'em:)
ಠ_ಠ
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:11 PM on October 21, 2014
ಠ_ಠ
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:11 PM on October 21, 2014
There was one that quoted Alan Partridge...
Here it is.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:15 PM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
Here it is.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:15 PM on October 21, 2014 [2 favorites]
Okay, Fizz is a repeat offender:
ѧѦѧ
and so am I - g'night.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:17 PM on October 21, 2014
ѧѦѧ
and so am I - g'night.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:17 PM on October 21, 2014
I love this thread! I have titles turned off, so I've missed lots of this wittiness (though Iridic's "What fresh El" is something I think of & chuckle over every time the CTA fails me), & I'm glad to see them here.
(Of my own posts, Cox Models & Drag Queens is the best I've managed.)
posted by Westringia F. at 11:22 PM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
(Of my own posts, Cox Models & Drag Queens is the best I've managed.)
posted by Westringia F. at 11:22 PM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]
In the recent ѧѦѧ post by fizz I couldn't really figure out what the post was about to begin with, let alone what it had to do with the Appalachian Trail.
posted by drlith at 8:51 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by drlith at 8:51 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]
How Not To Fuck Up Tools Like A Goddamned Ape made me laugh and laugh. It's just the way a shop foreman would say it, and it's so aggressive and crude, totally out of character with the friendly, good-natured narrator of the video. I still chuckle at it when it pops into my head.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 5:04 PM on October 22, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by mrbigmuscles at 5:04 PM on October 22, 2014 [3 favorites]
I'm very proud that one of my titles got me a high-five.
posted by benito.strauss at 5:44 PM on October 22, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by benito.strauss at 5:44 PM on October 22, 2014 [2 favorites]
In the recent ѧѦѧ post by fizz I couldn't really figure out what the post was about to begin with, let alone what it had to do with the Appalachian Trail.
Agreed - I just like the use of the mountains.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:47 AM on October 23, 2014
Agreed - I just like the use of the mountains.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:47 AM on October 23, 2014
I like this one — from Ask, which doesn't quite always lend itself to clever titling I think, but this is one of my faves. (It derives from an exchange at the top of this thread on the Blue.)
The non-ASCII examples here kind of crack me up because many of them have had the URL stub added by a mod. They're normally auto-generated from the title, so on this page you'll have FPP-titles-that-made-you-smile-or-laugh (with the dashes) in your address bar; it won't eat anything beyond ASCII though if I understand correctly, so sometimes we'll cobble together something vaguely descriptive from the post (body) text and manually add it so you'll have a URL that looks sort of in line with those for other posts.
There's a sort of unexpected beauty in those I think because they're rarely if ever very imaginative: with good reason I think, we really want to stay away from editing posts unilaterally if we can at all help it and while this is purely a URL issue and it leaves the post's content untouched, it's probably not an ideal venue for our own attempts at wit, right?
Most of the ones mentioned here are reasonably straightforward I think in terms of "string together a handful of words to say something about the content"; in the vast majority of cases I think there will be some kind of title in the post body, e.g. a video link and we'll just copy that.
So this is totally inside baseball but there's something vaguely amusing to me about say a 5,000-word megapost about, I don't know, Japanese buildings from the Meiji Restoration or whatever with some cool glyphfest title (totally making up a random extreme-outlier example here of course) and a mod, having attempted to make sense of it all, dutifully typing Meiji-Restoration-Architecture into the stub box.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:58 AM on October 23, 2014 [5 favorites]
The non-ASCII examples here kind of crack me up because many of them have had the URL stub added by a mod. They're normally auto-generated from the title, so on this page you'll have FPP-titles-that-made-you-smile-or-laugh (with the dashes) in your address bar; it won't eat anything beyond ASCII though if I understand correctly, so sometimes we'll cobble together something vaguely descriptive from the post (body) text and manually add it so you'll have a URL that looks sort of in line with those for other posts.
There's a sort of unexpected beauty in those I think because they're rarely if ever very imaginative: with good reason I think, we really want to stay away from editing posts unilaterally if we can at all help it and while this is purely a URL issue and it leaves the post's content untouched, it's probably not an ideal venue for our own attempts at wit, right?
Most of the ones mentioned here are reasonably straightforward I think in terms of "string together a handful of words to say something about the content"; in the vast majority of cases I think there will be some kind of title in the post body, e.g. a video link and we'll just copy that.
So this is totally inside baseball but there's something vaguely amusing to me about say a 5,000-word megapost about, I don't know, Japanese buildings from the Meiji Restoration or whatever with some cool glyphfest title (totally making up a random extreme-outlier example here of course) and a mod, having attempted to make sense of it all, dutifully typing Meiji-Restoration-Architecture into the stub box.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:58 AM on October 23, 2014 [5 favorites]
Inside jokes are the funniest, because your whole life is the setup.
Make t shirts now
posted by aydeejones at 8:24 PM on October 23, 2014
Make t shirts now
posted by aydeejones at 8:24 PM on October 23, 2014
That goes on the shirt too
posted by aydeejones at 8:25 PM on October 23, 2014
posted by aydeejones at 8:25 PM on October 23, 2014
Deleted as a double, but my favorite post title of all time was GIANT HILTER CROTCH COMPELLS YOU
posted by capricorn at 8:16 AM on October 24, 2014
posted by capricorn at 8:16 AM on October 24, 2014
> The non-ASCII examples here kind of crack me up because many of them have had the URL stub added by a mod.
Well dang, I never noticed. I'm still kind of proud that I managed a post with a totally relevant title and post content with absolutely no words in it.
Usually my post titles were more clever in my head than they look on the screen, but I remain fond of Hydra buys zombie.
posted by ardgedee at 10:11 AM on October 25, 2014
Well dang, I never noticed. I'm still kind of proud that I managed a post with a totally relevant title and post content with absolutely no words in it.
Usually my post titles were more clever in my head than they look on the screen, but I remain fond of Hydra buys zombie.
posted by ardgedee at 10:11 AM on October 25, 2014
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posted by exogenous at 9:20 AM on October 21, 2014 [1 favorite]