Website / ClickHole

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On June 12, 2014, the people behind The Onion launched ClickHole, a Spin-Off site focusing on clickbait-style content.

Essentially, if The Onion parodies newspapers like The New York Times and USA Today, ClickHole does the same for websites like BuzzFeed, Upworthy, The Huffington Post and Cracked. In 2020, it was sold to the manufacturers of Cards Against Humanity by the private equity group which gained control of The Onion.

ClickHole claims that unlike those websites, which make "pandering and misleading content, most tragically falling short of going viral", its site mission is to have its articles shared with millions, even before viewers can understand what they just read, making it a veritable black hole of clicks. It lampoons a fairly diverse range of content, from social justice blogging to adorable baby videos to inane quizzes, "listicles" and even Gamebook-style "ClickVentures", that The Onion's format doesn't let it cover.

ClickHole works with their own pages:

• "Find Out Your Dragon Name As Long As It Isn't Rugarth Because That One Is Mine"

Not to be confused with the 1972 film ClickHole, starring Billy Dee Williams. And them's the facts!

ClickHole provides examples of:

• The Ace: The quiz How Well Do You Know Johannes? will say you know Johannes if you click on the many extremely elaborate and dramatic answers, but if you click on anything remotely normal or boring, the quiz will insist you're thinking of Frank, cause Johannes is just too cool to be 53.
• Achievement System: Before the Cards Against Humanity buyout, the website kept track of how many times you've clicked on it, marking each milestone as you reach it. It reset when you reached the Cap of 9,999 clicks.
• All Musicals Are Adaptations: Exaggerated Trope; one article is just a list of gifs that could be adapted into musicals.
• The Artifact: A lot of their recent quizzes function more like checklists, still with a "1." at the beginning even though it's the only "question".
• Attending Your Own Funeral: 7 Things You Have To Do When Attending Your Own Funeral In Disguise
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • "Which Character From 'The Office' Are You?" It's actually an intervention for the reader's drinking problem.
  • "10 Things Food Industry CEOs Don't Want You To Know" The secrets have nothing to do with the food, but the CEOs themselves.
  • "6 Hand Gestures Considered Insulting In Foreign Cultures" features the OK sign (considered a rude gesture in Spain) as its masthead picture. Not only is this gesture not actually in the list, the images used in the list are self-produced and not stock.
  • "We Put 8 Teens In A Room With A Gun And Pretty Soon Human Nature Took Over" The teens completely ignore the gun and just start making out.
  • "‘Maintaining My Virginity Has Given Me Incredible Powers’: 5 Questions With Steven Spielberg". Spielberg got the inspiration for one of his movies from seeing "a huge shark eating someone with its enormous jaws".The movie was Indiana Jones
• Bamboo Technology: Gorillas build nuclear weapons out of forest materials.
• Bathos: Like The Onion, ClickHole depends heavily on bathos for much of its humor, juxtaposing mundane content that could easily be mistaken for BuzzFeed with serious topics.
  • The Ukraine Crisis Explained In GIFs And In-Depth Policy Papers From Esteemed Political Institutions.
  • 8 Baby Penguins That Are Pretty Cute But Don't Stand A Chance Against Hillary Clinton In 2016.
  • Why Your Mother And I Are Getting Divorced As Explained By "Orange Is The New Black" GIFs.
  • Are You A Real '90s Kid With Lupus?
  • 9 Impossibly Cute Animals Eating People Food, By Guest Aggregator Jonathan Franzen
  • 10 Messy Animals Who Need A Bath, which involves the aftermath of an oil spill.
  • Uplifting: This Donated Computer Lab Helps Students Take Their Cyber-Bullying To The Next Level
  • 4 Reasons Why Emma Watson Is The Absolute Greatest, And 4 Reasons Why Jennifer Lawrence Is The Absolute Greatest: A List Moderated By Jim Lehrer
  • Bad News, 'Better Call Saul' Fans: Earth Will Likely Become Uninhabitable In The Next 100,000 Years
  • Then there are Onion-style articles that relay unremarkable things in a professional tone, like "I'm Not Inviting Jessica P. To My Birthday Party. Here's Why" (from the point of view of a third-grader) and Dad, If You're Reading This, I Want You To Know I'm Upstairs. And It's Time For You To Drive Me To Connor's House.
• Barbarian Hero: President Janus of The Outerlands, in Which Future U.S. President Are You?, counts as one. He founded New America by reuniting the Farther Tribes and teaching them agriculture.
• Bears Are Bad News: The subject of the site's first ClickVenture, "Would You Survive A Bear Attack?"
• Bizarro Episode: Invoked examples in When Good TV Goes Bad: The Worst Episodes Of The Best TV Shows
• Black Cloak: Shaking Up Washington: Donald Trump Just Appointed a Cloaked Man as Secretary of the Hook.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Are You An Introvert, An Extrovert, Or A Sea Monster?
• British Brevity: 6 American Television Shows That Started In England makes this into a major running gag, with nearly every show listed being less than ten episodes long and usually ending with a Christmas special.
• Brought Down to Badass: In "20 Times Pope Francis Won Us Over", one of the times was when he temporarily lost his divine powers during an eclipse and had to save the Catholic faith with just his wits alone.
• But Thou Must!: Somebody Has To Be Scooter
  Look, we get it. On a 'Which Muppet Are You?' quiz, nobody wants to end up with Scooter. But someone's gotta do it. Who's it gonna be?
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Discussed in When I Started Writing 'Game Of Thrones,' I Didn't Know What Horses Looked Like, in which George R. R. Martin tried to write around his ignorance, and in the process depicted horses as having wheels, growling and barking, having wings, capable of being strangled by a child with just two fingers, having shells and horns, being put into satchels, having beaks, and being confused for men.
• Call-Back:
  • In January 2015, the site posted We Have A Winner: Say Hello To The Most Shared Image On The Internet, which features an image of a stoic man holding a glass of beer, with a typical Impact Font caption saying "HERE'S TO YOU". More than a month later, a new article called We Have A Winner: Say Hello To The Most Shared Video On The Internet was published, this time featuring the image remade as a video.
  • Whoa: Morgan Made The Mandatory Field-Trip T-Shirt Look Cute. Morgan Later makes an appearance in Whoa: Morgan’s Writing Her A’s Differently Now, and again in Whoa: Morgan Brought Coffee To First Period.
• The Caper: Inspiring: This Shelter Helps Women Leave Their Abusive Husbands By Training Them To Pull Off The Greatest Casino Heist Vegas Has Ever Seen
• Captain Obvious: Parodied in This Video Seems Silly, But It Makes a Good Point: the "good point" it makes is just having the text "racism is bad" bouncing around on screen to wacky music with a dancing dinosaur in the background.
• Caught with Your Pants Down:
  • Please, No One Come Trick-Or-Treating To My House This Year, For I Will Be Masturbating To Pornography
  • Fall From Grace: The Dalai Lama Has Broken His Vow of Celibacy By Masturbating to a Picture of Jessica Rabbit In An Airport Bathroom
• Chess with Death: Heartwarming: When Chris Pratt Heard A Young Fan Was Dying, He Challenged Death To A Chess Match For The Kid’s Life
• Christmas Creep: Exaggerated in "Okay, This Is Getting Ridiculous: Stores Are Already Rolling Out Their Christmas Stuff For Christmas 2015", published in December 2014.
• Clickbait Gag: This website invokes clickbait with every headline, since the entire website is one giant gag poking fun at cheap tactics meant to get web-revenue. They even titled a long rambling post "The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World" which is actually the entire text of Moby-Dick.
• Cloud Cuckoo Land: The entire website can be summed up as "what if BuzzFeed had its headquarters in Cloudcuckooland?" Even by parody standards it can get extremely bizarre.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Real-Life Tetris! This Man Died In A Falling Brick Accident.
  • The World's Dumbest Criminals
    [On Lee Harvey Oswald] This dum-dum was trying to kill President John F. Kennedy but totally botched it by firing two shots into the president's neck and back before FINALLY hitting him in the head! Nice aim, Annie Oakley!
  • EXCLUSIVE: Dozens Of Leaked Photos Of Ben Affleck Dressed As Bruce Wayne
  • 5 Iconic Movie Scenes That Were Actually Fake
  • Could David Lynch's Cryptic Tweet About 'Twin Peaks' On Showtime Hint At A Possible 'Twin Peaks' Revival?
  • An Underdog Story: These Amazing Parents Outlived Their Child
  • From This Will Change The Way You Watch 'Back To The Future':
    Narrator: Here's a fun one: when Marty arrives at the mall, we can see it's called Twin Pines Mall. Then Marty goes back in time to 1955.
    (Footage explicitly shows Marty running over one of the twin pines at Peabody's farm.)
    Narrator: When he comes back, the mall is called Lone Pine Mall, which is an anagram for Lean Lemon Lip, the name of this character from Biff's gang.
    (Footage shows '50s Biff doing the "Hello? Anybody home?" routine on '50s George, with an arrow labelled "Lean Lemon Lip" pointing to 3D.)
  • Awesome! This Lucky School Got Two Proms. The narration is completely oblivious, but the school is in Georgia, and the header photo shows one prom room full of white students, the other full of black ones.
  • Ultimate Life Hacker? Meet The Woman Who Says She’ll Do Things, Then Doesn’t Do Them
  • Humanity Could Totally Pull Off The Tower Of Babel At This Point
  • During the prerelease period of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, ClickHole posted an article full of pictures of Ben Affleck in formal attire, and claimed that these are leaked photos fans discovered of him in-character as Bruce Wayne.
    "You'll have to use Google to find them all, but even a quick search for 'Ben Affleck' turned up hundreds, if not thousands, of images of Affleck dressed EXACTLY like a muscular, dapper millionaire. We are officially geeking out."
• Comical Overreacting: Unimaginable: This Psychopath Watched a Whole YouTube Video On the Train At Full Volume
• Composite Character: Education Win: This Amazing School is Streamlining Its History Course By Combining All the Founding Fathers Into A Single Composite Character.
• Continuity Nod: On May 31st of 2016, ClickHole posted an article called "If Donald Trump Is Elected, We Will Remove These Photoshops Of Him Bald Out Of Respect For The Office Of President". On November 15th of the same year, the article was gone and replaced with We Don’t Know How To Take Down These Photoshops Of Bald Donald Trump, So We’ve Stretched His Face Out All Wide So Nobody Can Recognize It’s Him
  • The man who wrote the screenplay in If People Think There’s A Quick Fix To Illegal Immigration They’re As Misguided As The Scientists In My Screenplay ‘Chronotaur: Labyrinth Of Time’, Thomas Brugel, later brings up his screenplay again in Abstinence-Only Education Is As Doomed To Fail As The Robo-Chronotaur Built To Fight The Chronotaur In My Screenplay ‘Chronotaur: Labyrinth Of Time’ and America’s Middle Class Is Being Erased By Income Inequality Like The Scientists Erased From Existence After The Clone-otaur Changes The Past In My Screenplay ‘Chronotaur 3: Hoof Of History’
  • Our Best 65 Guesses As To What The Hanging Tennis Ball In Garages Is For is followed up nearly a month later with 51 More Guesses As To What The Hanging Tennis Ball In Garages Is For
  • Guzmer appears in the background of their behind the scenes featurette.
• Cosmic Horror Story: An increasing number of their articles edge into this genre, going from "funny parodies of clickbait" to just plain weird.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • invokedIn Which One of Those Shape Guys Are You, With the Hats?, the author just can't remember the name of the Mr. Men, or just about anything about them.
  • The 7 Most Shocking Plot Twists Of All Time
    [on Frozen] Who saw it coming when, at the end of this gripping crime drama set in 1960s Boston, we realized we were definitely in the wrong theater.
  • 8 Things We Loved About J.K. Rowling’s New Harry Potter Short Story uses intentionally false descriptions of the short story "Dumbledore’s Army Reunites at Quidditch World Cup Final", from claiming that there is Purple Prose about the characters' capes (the closest the actual story has is Luna Lovegood's Quidditch World Cup robes), to revealing that Hagrid had been eaten by "Better Hagrid" (a bigger giant who's identical to the original Hagrid), to saying the story takes place at a Hogwarts school reunion. All to the point that this is the most accurate paragraph describing the story:
    3. The Adjectives: As usual, Rowling is in top form with her use of adjectives, using ones like "silver," "eccentric," and even the impressively hyphenated "style-deficient."
• Creepy Long Fingers: President Obama is pictured with them in Here Are 4 Pics Of The Nasty Prez O-BUMPER Dipping His BUNGLER’S FINGERS In People’s SOUP AND MILK In Order To DESTROY LUNCH For All America.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Deeply Troubling: This Boxing Match Between John Cena And Michael Caine Seemed Like It Was Going To Be For A Good Cause But No Charities Appear To Be Involved And Michael Caine Looks Pretty Injured.
• Cutting the Electronic Leash: Environmental Disaster: The Oceans Are Now Irreversibly Polluted With Cell Phones That Businessmen Have Thrown In After Realizing What’s Truly Important Is Family.
• Dance Party Ending: Thank God: The Penguins In This Kids Movie Just Started A Soul Train To ‘Everybody Dance Now’ Which Means The Movie Will Probably Be Over Soon.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Not A Great Sign: Every Blurb On This Book Cover Is Clearly Written So As To Carefully Avoid Having To Say The Book Is Good.
• Deconstructive Parody: "2 Celebrities In Snuggies Is Enough For A Listicle, Right?" demonstrates how certain subjects can get too narrow for effective content aggregation.
• Deep Cover Agent: "Going Undercover: Jeff Sessions Has Disguised Himself As A Cartel Member And Strapped Himself With A Surveillance Wire In Order To Read The Wikipedia Entry For Marijuana"
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • From Can You Match These Famous Comedy Quotes To The Coworkers Quoting Them?:
    7. [Every single line from Airplane!] –Airplane!
  • Proud And Proud Of It: Meet The Woman Who's Proud And Proud Of The Fact She's Proud Of Being Proud
• Defiled Forever: Parodied, complete with Purple Prose, in 6 Gazebos Forever Sullied By The Blow Jobs That Transpired Therein.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In Murderfull Manor, one possible ending involves lobbing a Molotov Cocktail into the realm of the Octopus Gods, with brutal results. Best of all, you get a free avacado out of the deal!
• Disproportionate Celebration: A major gag of spinoff site Resistancehole, which claims that literally any slight to the Trump administration is a victory that will sink his plans. For example: "Internet FTW: Someone Photoshopped A Gazelle Next To Donald Trump, And It’s Going Viral Under The Assumption That It Takes Him Down In Some Way."
• Disproportionate Retribution: "Incredible! Taylor Swift Perfectly Shut Down This Hater By Slowly And Calculatedly Destroying His Life Over The Course Of Many Years."
• Dog Stereotype: Zig Zagged in the "These Videos Will Really Make You Think About Pitbulls" series. The first video, "This Video Will Make You Rethink The Way You Think About Pitbulls Forever", is a straight clickbait video of a woman playing with a pitbull. The second video, "This Video Will Make You Go Back To The Original Way You Thought About Pitbulls", depicts an illegal dog fight. The third video, "This Video Will Drastically Change The Way Pitbulls Think About You", is a pitbull watching footage of a Desert Rock exercise and glaring at the viewer while a Drone of Dread plays. Finally, the fourth video, "This Video Will Not Play Into The Way You Think About Pitbulls Whatsoever", is completely irrelevant footage of a car lot.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Invoked in "This Video Seems Silly, But It Makes A Good Point." (The video is a cartoon dinosaur dancing to a silly tune with ridiculous sound effects, overlaid with the text "Racism is bad"!)
• Downer Ending: "‘Maintaining My Virginity Has Given Me Incredible Powers’: 5 Questions With Steven Spielberg". Spielberg says at the end of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, fellow aliens immediately kill ET for failing in his mission to steal one of Elliott’s sweatshirts.
• Easter Egg: Most of the videos in the Well Played tag have a non-inconsequential chance of redirecting to a short tangentially-related "secret" video about the topic instead of showing the actual video. These range from generally harmless to self-deprecating to completely and utterly deranged.
• Edutainment Show: "Learn Attack," which is essentially Look Around You in the style of shows like Vsauce.
• Eldritch Abomination: Americans and Guzmer Try British Candy For the First Time.
  • 10 Telltale Signs That Daddy's Home
• Eldritch Location: The house from the Windows 95 Maze screensaver. It seems to be related to House of Leaves.
• Elvis Impersonator: Deeply Sad: Guy Who Came In Last Place In An Elvis Lookalike Contest Gets Drunk Alone In A Dive Bar.
• Emergency Broadcast: THE FOLLOWING IS A TEST OF THE JACOB-TREMBLAY-PETTING-A-DUCK ALERT SYSTEM. PLEASE DISREGARD.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: In "Why I Stopped Watching Porn And So Should You", the author David Swegler developed Reality Warper powers after a few weeks without porn.
• Evil Counterpart: In "‘I’d Like To Order A Scientific Investigation Into How Tugboats Can Move Boats That Are So Much Larger Than Them’: 5 Questions With Elizabeth Warren", Warren says her greatest rival in the senate is Shadow Warren (who resides in Dark Massachusetts).
• Extreme Doormat: Keeping In Touch: Sean Spicer Has Given Donald Trump His Personal Email in Case The President Ever Wants to Belittle or Humiliate Him in the Future.
• Fad Super: With Staying Relevant: Rolaids Is Stepping Into The Virtual-Reality Arena With A Game Where You Eat A Rolaid
• Fan Nickname: "This Will Change The Way You Watch 'Back To The Future'" asserts that Back to the Future 1 is merely a nickname given to the film by fans and the official title is Back Time the Future.
• Fake-Out Opening: Hey, I Think Someone Here Left Their Computer Logged In begins as a blog post by a political analyst ranting about Obama and the War Powers Resolution, but by the end of the first paragraph it abruptly switches to someone else messing with the post while the analyst is away.
• Flying Face: Teens Rejoice! Pat Sajak’s Head Is Floating Through Times Square Spitting On People!
• Frankenstein's Monster: "5 Ways To Tell If You Need To Report Frankenstein For Suspicious Behavior On The Train Or If It’s Just Frankenstein Being Frankenstein"
• Funny Background Event: This Girl’s Reaction To Tasting Ice Cream For The First Time Pales In Comparison To This Man Eating His 600th Pastrami Sandwich
• Gag Censor: The narrator of How To Get Nude Pics Of Absolutely Any Celebrity does this with his, uh, portraits, although apparently out of a sense of artistry rather than modesty or humor.
  What I like to do is just draw a lightning bolt right here, and if you've got time, I'd like to add some action lines for emphasis—and what this does is just give it a little bit of kinetic energy and dynamism... it's just a fun, fresh way to look at your celebrities naked.
• Gainax Ending: 10 Crayons Pretending To Be Other Crayons
  The crayons… they have won again.
• Gambit Roulette / Zany Scheme: Big Red Horizon: My Journey Through The American Justice System is about a plan to get free lobster.
• Gamebooks: The ClickVenture series.
• Gaslighting: "I Keep My Grandfather’s Mind Active By Calling Him Every Day And Telling Him World War II Never Happened" is a bizarre inversion, where the mind games are meant to keep the victim sane.
• Glurge: invokedSubverted by What This Adorable Little Girl Says Will Melt Your Heart
  "Just remember: no matter how many videos you watch, or how many lists you read, you're still gonna feel all alone. I guess that's just the way it is."
• Genius Bruiser: The bully in this video from their YouTube channel is an example of the villainous type.
• Gentle Giant: The Gentle Giant: 5 Times Human Skyscraper Mike Pence Used His Titanic Strength To Help The American Worker
• Glasses Are Sexy:
  • In These Pics Prove Glasses Look Hot Even Without Celebrities you don't even need somebody to wear them.
  • Present in one of the pictures in You Will Not Find Hotter Pictures Of Kate Upton Anywhere—This I Vow.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: The Ability To Play As Bowser Has Made Our Society More Evil
• Grandfather Paradox: I Never Understood My Father Until I Traveled Through Time And Became Him
• Groin Attack: A Piece Of History: The Asteroid That Hit JFK In The Nuts So Hard He Died Will Be On Display At The Smithsonian For A Monthlong Exhibit
• Hate Sink: This Man Says A Series Of Offensive Statements And Then Stands There So That You Can Yell At Him.
• Hope Spot: This Teen Has An Inspiring Message For His Bully, Then Gets Totally Owned By The Bully’s Surprisingly Convincing Rebuttal
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: It's Time To Admit That Depression Is Real, Except For Teens Who Are Just Being Moody
• Humanoid Abomination: Dating Bad Boys vs. Dating the One Bad Man.
• Humans Are Bastards: This Video Will Drastically Change The Way Pitbulls Think About You
• Human Popsicle: I Don’t Want My Cryogenically Frozen Daughter To Thaw Out In Trump’s America
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: "Coolest. Rock Star. Ever: Sting Just Gave One Lucky Fan A 20-Minute Head Start Into The Woods Before Beginning His Relentless Hunt"
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Dismissed as unrealistic in "Modern Video Games Are Giving Kids Unrealistic Standards For How Many Swords They Can Carry At One Time," using (perhaps ironically) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's infamous inventory limits as the catalyst for the article.
• I Am Not Shazaminvoked: One of the 7 Ways They Could Totally Screw Up The New 'Star Wars' Movies is "Accidentally write the entire script referring to Luke Skywalker as 'Star Wars'".
  • James Cameron calls the na'vi "Avatars" in I Wish The Avatars Were Yellow (By James Cameron)
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: I Know This Sounds Like Spam, But I Really Did Double My Mass In TWO WEEKS And Now Women Can’t Get Enough Of Me And I’m SCARED
• Indecisive Parody: ClickHole parodies native advertising in its sponsored posts, but it's undeniably an example of native advertising in and of itself.
  • They may be aware of it though. The actual sponsored content is given labels like "Poor websites in need of clicks" and "Lesser news from the web."
• Internet Counterattack: The moralistic breed is mocked in Justice At Last! When This Girl Was Cyberbullied By A Classmate, The Internet Came Together And Got Her Bully To Commit Suicide!
• Japan Takes Over the World: 'Zelda: Breath of the Wild' Is A Masterpiece That Proves Japan Could Pull Off Another Pearl Harbor.
• Jerkass: The author of I Had a Terrible Experience At This Restaurant Because I Am A Terrible Person heckles the staff, has petty complaints, and makes unnecessarily complex orders just because.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
• "Just Joking" Justification: Huge Relief: This Student Thought He Was Being Bullied For Years But The Other Kid Was Just Joking Around
• Karma Houdini: Now That Trump's Cronies Are Starting to Fall, It's Only a Matter of Time Before Everything Works Out Totally Fine For All Guilty Parties Involved
• Kick the Dog: Fair Enough: Organic Valley Just Cashed In On 30 Years of Anti-Animal Cruelty Good Will by Hurling a Live Calf Into a Jet Engine.
• Kids Are Cruel / Teens Are Monsters:
  • No Parent Should Have To Endure The Agony And Heartbreak Of Having A Shitty Kid
  • This Little Boy's Grandfather Started To Cry ... And His Reaction Will Blow You Away
  • Played with in What These Kids Are Doing For Their Bullied Classmate Is So Nice That We’re Nervous They’re Setting Him Up For Something Much Worse
  • Which One Of My Garbage Sons Are You?
• Leave the Camera Running:
  • Got Three Minutes? This Video Will Confirm That
  • This Stick Of Butter Is Left Out At Room Temperature; You Won't Believe What Happens Next
  • This Stick Of Butter Is Left Out At Room Temperature: Patriotic Edition
  • We Left A Bowl Of Dog Food In The Woods To See If We Could Catch Sasquatch On Camera. Will Someone Watch All This Footage For Us So We Don't Have To? Thanks!
• Life Drinker: Samuel Rage, Chief Digital Officer of ClickHole.com, is (supposedly) immortal, and it's all thanks to you.
  Samuel Rage: Thank you so much for learning from me, and thank you for everything you've let me take from you. You're the reason I'm never going to die, and I'm so grateful to (points at camera) you.
• Literal Metaphor: Troubling Sign: Donald Trump is Shaking Hands With a Pig That Has "Corruption" Written On It And Is Holding a Bag That Reads "Kickbacks".
• Long List:
  • Just Tags
  • How Many Bones Do You Have? is a checklist of all the bones in the human body. All 206 of them.
• Madness Mantra: Lampshaded in the title of "Read The Word ‘Glen’ 200 Times In A Row And You’ll Slowly Begin Realizing That It’s A Really Weird Name"
• Make an Example of Them: Uncompromising: This Tyrant Unfriends All Dissidents As An Example To The Rest
• Manipulative Editing: The They Said What!? feature satirizes the use of Manipulative Editing by real celebrity gossip sites.
• Meaningful Name: In their analysis of Spirited Away, they show how the character's names hint at a subtle message left by the film's creators.
  "'Chihiro' translates to 'Moon Walker', while 'Sen', the name she adopts at the bath house, means 'hoax.' 'Yubaba' translates to 'conspiracy', while her sister Zeniba's name means 'NASA', and 'Haku' means 'Stanley Kubrick.'"
• Medium Awareness: Campaign Setback: A Thought Bubble With Pornography Inside Of It Has Appeared Over Bernie Sanders’ Head
• Mind Screw: Exploited with "If You Can't Tell What's Going On Here There's Something Wrong With You"
• Minimalism: Zylch is a social media website that doesn't use ads, sponsored posts, or any content at all.
• Mini-Mecha: The Future Is Here: This 60-Ton Mech Suit Helps Vice Principals Pry Apart Teens Who Get Too Close Together At School Dances At Maximum Efficiency
• Mistaken Identity: Three of the outcomes of "You're Mulan, Right?" (One of them is Pocahontas.)
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: When asked If Tony Hawk ever plays his own video game, he says he doesn't, but his kids do. He says the last time they played they made him watch, and when his character died in the game, he also died in real life.
  "It’s brutal."
• Mood Dissonance: "A Snake Is Biting Me Right Now."
• My God, What Have I Done?: A Barrel Maker Is Confronted By People Whose Lives Were Ruined By His Poorly Crafted Barrels.
• Never Live It Down:invoked NASA Says There Could Be Life On Europa, But They Also Said The 'Challenger' Was Safe To Fly, So Take It With A Grain Of Salt
• Nobody Here but Us Statues: Shameful: Congressional Republicans Are Dodging Questions About The AHCA By Posing As Cavemen In The Smithsonian’s Early Man Diorama.
• Noodle Incident: Yep. He Went There. talks about something Clive Owen had done. What he did is left to the imagination.
  • Uh Oh: Dan’s Death Must Have Been Really Gnarly If Everyone On Facebook Is Being So Vague About It.
• Nostalgia Filter: Parodied in '90s Kids Rejoice! The End Of Net Neutrality Means The Return Of Dial-Up Speeds
• Off with His Head!: "Silencing Dissent: The Catholic Church Has Beheaded Neil deGrasse Tyson For His Heretical Claim That The Earth Revolves Around The Sun".
• Only the Worthy May Pass: Only The Pure Of Heart May See Our Picture Of Muscular Tommy Pickles
• The Other Darrin: invokedAll The Seinfelds, Ranked
• Overly Narrow Superlative:
  • The Titular Owl Hour in Would You Make A Good Contestant On Owl Hour, America’s 2nd-Highest-Rated Owl Game Show?
  • Prodigy: This 16-Year-Old Just Became The Youngest-Ever Grandmaster Of Drinking Out Of A Hose
• Our Homunculi Are Different: 5 Ways The Wu-Tang Clan Changed Hip-Hop Forever. One way they changed history is using alchemy to create a homunculus.
• Oxymoronic Being: Living Paradox: This Man Has Shared An Article He Disagrees With
• Parallel Porn Titles: "Inclusivity Win! Mr. Incredible Will Be Played By An Asian-American In An Upcoming ‘The Incredibles’ Porn Parody". The parody is named The Incredibangers, in case you were wondering.
• Parent Never Came Back from the Store: Subverted with "Communication Is Key: This Dad Just Came Back From Getting Cigarettes To Tell His Family He Was Abandoning Them."
• Parental Bonus: invoked 10 Jokes From Children's Shows You Didn't Get As A Kid collects increasingly blatantly fake examples, all from George Carlin routines.
• Patriotic Fervor: PatriotHole is, parodying far-right media, all about this.
• Perp Sweating: Which Muppet Baby Are You, Under Penalty Of Perjury?
• Plagiarism: The Time I Spent On a Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On the World is just Moby-Dick word for word. Yes, all 200,000+ words of it.
• People Puppets: Sorry To Hear That, Billy: Billy Joel Has Revealed That That 2Pac Hologram Walked Inside Him A Few Years Back And Has Been Using His Body As A Host Ever Since
• Poke the Poodle: A Running Gag is ISIS committing bizarre but ultimately inconsequential crimes, with the site treating them with the utmost seriousness.
  • Disgusting: ISIS Has Announced That It Finds The St. Louis Arch Unimpressive And Has No Wish To Attack It
  • Horrifying: ISIS Has Spent Over $25 Million Attempting To Recruit Elvis Costello
  • Latest Attack: ISIS Just Replaced The ‘Friends’ Laugh Track With Someone Making Negative Comments About Ross
  • Latest Attack: ISIS Just Put The Pentagon On eBay
  • Horrible: ISIS Fished Up All The Catfish Out Of The Old Creek
  • Disgusting: ISIS Just Released A 2-Star Review Of ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’
  • Latest Attack: ISIS Just Won Comic-Con With An Incredible Panel Moderated By Chris Hardwick
  • Disgusting: ISIS Has Released A Moving Fan-Tribute Video To The Villainous Captain Barbossa From The ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ Franchise.
  • A non-ISIS example with "A Kingpin Falls: The Leader Of MS-13 Was Apprehended After Filling Up A Free Water Cup With Dr. Pepper At A Soda Dispenser".
• Political Overcorrectness: Parodies this with articles such as "Let’s Have An Open Dialogue About Sexuality That Completely Validates My Point Of View", or "5 Disney Princesses Reimagined As Caucasian"
• Precision F-Strike: You are rewarded with this in a final scene in one of their Hardy Boys inspired Choose Your Own Adventures, Mysterious Shadows of Skullshadow Island.
• Product Placement: The sponsored articles usually work in their respective products somewhere. It's especially notable in 7 Notable Movie Villains Who Were Probably Just Hangry ("Hangry Moments" is a Jack Link's advertising campaign).
• Properly Paranoid: 8 Health Mistakes You're Probably Not Making, But You Know Us, We're Worriers
• Proscenium Reveal: The true ending of The Mysterious Shadows Of Skullshadow Island.
• Race Lift: 5 Disney Princesses Reimagined As Caucasian
  • Discussed in Just Thinking Out Loud Here, But What If Lana Del Rey Were Black?
• Rage Against the Heavens: This Kid Is Definitely Going To Hell
• Really 700 Years Old: Doctors Told Him He Only Had 6 Months To Live. 6,000 Years Later He’s Still Proving Them Wrong.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The girl from What This Adorable Little Girl Says Will Melt Your Heart gives one to you (that doubles as a commentary on the state of Internet media).
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Although you can't see it anymore (it was quickly taken down by ClickHole), the video "If You Grew Up With 'Calvin and Hobbes', You Need To Watch This Right Now" showed Calvin and Hobbes having sex with each other.
  • WATCH: iPhone 6 Unboxing has the unboxer take his new iPhone 6 Plus outside, toss it into a hole in the ground, and bury it, all while still talking as if it's a straight unboxing video, asking his viewers what they plan to do with their iPhone.
  • Shots Fired: Quiznos Has Hired Subway’s Jared Fogle For A New Ad Campaign Claiming That Quiznos Sandwiches Cured His Pedophilia. Audacious both In-Universe and out.
• Relax-o-Vision: What's Happening In Gaza Will Shock You, So Watch This Instead
• Retconning the Wiki: Parodied in "Man On A Mission: This Man Is Adding 'And Them's The Facts' To The End Of Every Wikipedia Article".
• Rooting for the Empire: In-Universe. According to 7 Words That Have No English Translation, every language except English has the word "Kloyfe", which is "The act of openly rooting for Bowser and his evil servants in their eternal fight against Mario and Luigi."
• Running Gag
  • Footage of fire trucks being mistaken for something else, complete with misleading thumbnail image, such as Wow: Cosplayer Builds Incredible Iron Man Costume.
  • Harrison Ford getting caught and severely injured in over-the-top Looney Tunes style accidents, such as Lucky To Be Alive: Harrison Ford Ate A Chili Pepper So Hot His Head Turned Into A Nuclear Explosion .
  • All of the articles that feature around 20 or so interesting facts, such as 20 Insanely Mind-Blowing Facts About Coffee, feature a man often spoken highly of named Bruce.
  • Articles titled "The problem with ‘The Flash’.'', e.g. Flash Needs To Go Faster, Why Doesn’t Flash Run To Italy For Pasta Every Meal? .
  • Sesame Street going too far, such as Did ‘Sesame Street’ Go Too Far Yesterday When Big Bird Ate An American Flag?
  • J. K. Rowling revealing increasingly ridiculous things about Harry Potter on Twitter, including Whoa! JK Rowling Just Revealed That Philip Seymour Hoffman Is Also Dead in the Harry Potter Universe.
  • Historically important items being put in display in the Smithsonian, usually (but not always) involving JFK dying, e.g. A Piece Of History: The Diving Board That JFK Died On After Trying To Do A Back Dive Is For Sale.
  • In their videos, particularly the Learn Attack series, random facts about God will be mentioned, each of them making him out to be what might be described as a kind of chaotic goblin. For instance, he crawls around inside a vast tunnel network connecting volcanoes and will pop his head out of them to determine his location.
• Scandal Gate: 9/11 is called Towergate in What The Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You: 16 Years Ago, Radical Islamic Terrorists Crashed Airplanes Into The World Trade Center, Killing Thousands Of Hardworking Americans.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Holy Fucking Shit: Fargas The Foreign-Exchange Student Just Cracked His Head Open In Gym Class And Is Shrieking Like A Motherfucker
• Screwed by the Lawyers: In-Universe with 6 Unforgettable Movie Characters That Were Changed Last Minute From A Giant Moth That Infringed On Mothra’s Copyright.
• Serious Business: Their article on the announcement of Fuller House is Cancel Your Son's Funeral Because 'Full House' Is Officially Coming Back!
• Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: Staying Pure: Mike Pence is Crushing His Testicles With the Lincoln Bible After Being Aroused by the Feminine Contours of the Capitol Building.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The ending of the ClickVenture "You’re A Grocery Store Delivery Boy. Can You Deliver A Pound Of Ground Beef To The Astronauts On The International Space Station?", in which, after traveling across the galaxy to deliver a pound of ground beef to the International Space Station so the astronauts could use it to kill a spider, the astronaut drops it on the ground and misses the spider.
• Shallow News Site Satire: This website specifically parodies clickbait sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy by posting fake Clickbait Gags satirizing a broad range of topics.
• Shameless Self-Promoter: If People Think There’s A Quick Fix To Illegal Immigration They’re As Misguided As The Scientists In My Screenplay ‘Chronotaur: Labyrinth Of Time’
  • Again in Abstinence-Only Education Is As Doomed To Fail As The Robo-Chronotaur Built To Fight The Chronotaur In My Screenplay ‘Chronotaur: Labyrinth Of Time’ and America’s Middle Class Is Being Erased By Income Inequality Like The Scientists Erased From Existence After The Clone-otaur Changes The Past In My Screenplay ‘Chronotaur 3: Hoof Of History’
• Shoot the Dog: Bold New Strategy: Febreze Has Released a New Line of Guns To Shoot Your Dog With If It Starts to Smell
• Skewed Priorities: The lifeguard in Powerful: These Veterans Recount The Heroics Of The One Lifeguard Who Was On Duty During D-Day makes all the soldiers get out of the water when he thinks he's spotted a shark, but lets them back in when he finds out it was just a German submarine.
• Slow-Loading Internet Image: These Koalas Are Refusing To Load In Support Of Net Neutrality %Broken on current Click Hole site, hence the archive link. Not perfect, but it is what it is.%
• Smug Snake: A Master Strategist: Steve Bannon Has Completed His Yearlong Plan to Become Increasingly Irrelevant Before Eventually Getting Fired.
• Snowball Lie: An Icon Disgraced: An Exposé In ‘The New York Times’ Has Found That Jane Goodall Lied About The Existence Of Chimpanzees
• Sophisticated as Hell: A screencap from Check Out These SMOKING Rihanna Nip Slips:
  Whereas the Defendant, ClickHole, a web entity specializing in content curating and the subsequent sharing thereof, known hereafter as "Defendant," wishes to curate and disperse photographs of nipples belonging to recording artist Rihanna and Def Jam Recordings, known collectively hereafter as "Plaintiff" and which were exposed to the public through the failure of requirements to perform their sanctioned duty to Obscure and Occlude said Nipples [...] such garment-based failures of occlusion shall be known hereafter as the "Nip Slips," [...] all images of both photographic, painted, or generated throughout in this and all other known Universes from here into perpetuity of the Nips such as they have become known as such failures of occlusion legally deemed to be Nip Slips, to be classified as such by and at the sole discretion of the Plaintiff or any appointed representatives (see Article VII, Section A: "The Selection Of A Nip Slip Identification Committee To Execute Formal Classifications Nip Slips As Proxy of Plaintiff").
• Speed Sex: "How Many of These Jay-Z Songs About Having Great 10-Second Sex Have You Heard?".
• Spiritual Antithesis: Invoked with "Righting Wrongs: Subway's New Spokesperson is a Man Who Gained 300 Pounds Eating Its Sandwiches And Also Has No Plans to Act on His Lust for Children".
• Spontaneous Generation: According to the about page, staff members don't actually write any articles; instead, they are spontaneously created of their own will.
• Spot the Imposter: Tense Standoff: A Trembling Amazon Security Guard Isn’t Sure Whether To Shoot Jeff Bezos Or The Alexa Claiming To Be Jeff Bezos
• Stable Time Loop: In this edition of They Said What!?, Aretha Franklin says she was inspired to be who she was when she saw Aretha Franklin on stage.
• Stalker Without a Crush: The narrator of This Gay Couple And Their Family Are Perfect, And Totally Unaware We've Been Following Them All Day. We don't really know for certain if there's something more, though.
• Statuesque Stunner: A 9'5" Emma Watson in Just When You Didn't Think Emma Watson Could Get Any More Amazing, She Grows 4 Feet Taller.
• Stomach of Holding: Never Pay For Office Supplies Again With This Easy Trick assumes all of your co-workers have one.
• Straw Nihilist: Mocked mercilessly in "7 Nihilistic Quotes Only Brilliant, Misunderstood Young Males on the Internet Will Appreciate.
• Sudden Name Change: Their slideshow articles were originally called Click 5. Now they're just generically called slideshows.
• Surreal Humor: Commonly shows up. Initially it was mostly found in the quizzes, like Are You a Big Jazz Boy or a Little Jazz Boy and How New York are You, but it has since migrated to ClickVentures like House-Sit For Your Neighbors While They’re On Vacation! and You Are The Cannibal Lobster-Man Of New England. Can You Become The Governor Of Maine?
• Take That!:
  • Finally! A Social Media Site With No Ads, Pictures, Words, Colors, Or Content, an unsubtle riff on ello.co.
  • Here's A Fucking Anime Quiz is written as if it's pandering to anime fans against its will.
  • I Don’t Let My Kids Watch Winnie The Pooh Because I Don’t Want Them Idolizing A Fat Virgin
  • Stunning Map Shows Just How Much Of Iraq And Syria VICE Now Controls
• Temporal Paradox: According to the "Witnessing History" series, George Foreman got the idea for the George Foreman grill after Muhammad Ali smacked him across the head with one.
• The Tetris Effect: Mind-Blowing: This Teen Has An Incredible Ability To Perceive Everything He Sees As A ‘Tony Hawk’ Level
• This Loser Is You: The picture used to represent the viewer in quiz results is an overweight man with greasy hair and unflattering clothes.
• Throwing the Fight: Take A Dive: If You Throw This ‘Rocket Power’ Quiz, We Both Stand To Make A Lot Of Money
• To Serve Man: Heartbreaking: The Jim Henson Company Has Revealed That Jim Henson Was Only Dead For 10 Minutes Before Kermit The Frog Started Eating Him
• Traintop Battle: A Commitment To Justice: Jeff Sessions Is Currently Chasing A High School Senior Who Got High At Prom Across The Roof Of A Siberian Train
• Undignified Death: Grim Prognosis: Researchers Have Determined That Penguins Will Look Incredibly Stupid When They’re Dying From Global Warming
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: A parent gains access to this strength after seeing their son trapped under a car, but then proceeds to use the strength to lift seven other things.
• Un-Installment:
  • The "Next Week on ClickHole" series has previews for articles that won't exist. In addition, EVERYTHING MUST GO: End-Of-Summer Content Blowout features nonexistent articles about Summer, this article discusses a few errors of their "13 Hedgehogs Who Need A Vacation" article published the previous week (which in reality doesn't exist), and this one pays its final respects to nonexistant articles.
  • Some articles mention the comments section. for example, The Ability To Play As Bowser Has Made Our Society More Evil invites the reader to discuss the impact of Bowser Culture on their lives. However, there was no comment section when these articles were written.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Time After Time I Refuse You, And Still You Come Back to This House, Grigory?
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In 37 Dogs Guaranteed To Brighten Your Day, #35 is a hand with a mouth droning the word "dog", its voice echoing. The narrator's reaction?
  "Aw... that is not how you beg for a treat. No... bad."
• Vagueness Is Coming: 5 Tragedies Weirdly Predicted By Adam Sandler
• Very Special Episode: In this article, ClickHole struggles to describe Gamergate in a very serious manner, unsure if its information on the movement is valid.
• Viewers Are Morons: ClickHole has a helpful infographic◊ in case you would like to visit the site, but don't know how to click. (Fortunately for the clicking-impaired, they are working on a version that can be navigated using only the power of your mind.)
  • Trolling Master Class: Some Genius Prankster Uploaded A Photo Of Helicobacter Pylori Bacteria To The Wikipedia Page For Burkholderia Cenocepacia
• Wild Teen Party: "Your Parents Are Going Out Of Town. Host The Party Of The Year!".
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: "7 Everyday Products That Were Invented By Accident." Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered immortality and lived a luxurious life, until realizing it's a curse that causes him to outlive his friends and lovers. This made him dilute it so it would only cure diseases, so as to not rob humanity of the gift of death.
  • Implied in Doctors Told Him He Only Had 6 Months To Live. 6,000 Years Later He’s Still Proving Them Wrong.
    I can’t remember their faces. I can’t remember my true name anymore. So many loves have died.
• Word-Salad Humor: This Environmentally Friendly Quiz Is Made From 100% Recycled Quiz Materials!
• World of Chaos: The people from People Open Up About How They Started Believing In God After Finding A Big Bag Of Laundry In A Barn and Harrowing: Listen To These People Talk About The First Time They Ran Out Of Radishes seem to live here. One of them apparently has an angel living in his garage and kissing his wife. Another had her eyes moved closer together as punishment for not having any radishes to offer to a skeleton. Yet another threw the "Trigonometry Baby" into the ocean because "Nobody cares about triangles! They're not even round, and they don't taste like anything!"
• Virgin Power: "‘Maintaining My Virginity Has Given Me Incredible Powers’: 5 Questions With Steven Spielberg".
• Virgin Sacrifice: 7 Types Of Virgins That Are So Obnoxious You Honestly Feel Like Kind Of A Dick Sacrificing Them To Gator God
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Cracking Down: The NHL Has Unveiled A New Hyperbolic Penalty Box That Makes 3 Minutes Inside It Feel Like 500 Years
• You Bastard!: 10 Adorable Pictures Of Pugs That Are Exclusively For Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki Because He's Probably Super Stressed Out Right Now And He Needs Them
  Okay, so this list is exclusively for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki because he's probably super stressed right now and needs to relax. If you are not the Prime Minister, we ask that you stop reading now.
  
  [...]
  
  Are you still here? Jesus Christ, what are you still doing here? Okay, fine. Prime Minister, if you want a PDF of this slideshow you can enjoy without these other assholes ruining it, email us and we'll send it to you as an attachment immediately. We deeply apologize.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Parodied in Tree Nuts, Ranked Using A System You Could Never Even Begin To Understand
• Your Mom: I Put On A Fat Suit To Understand What It’s Like To Be Your Mom