33 Terrible Maps For People Who Love Dumb Data
Updated on December 9, 2025
Cartography is serious business… and then there are terrible maps. Today’s gallery celebrates funny maps that value the punchline over the projection, the pun over the compass. Expect map memes that twist logic, dazzle with fake data, and still teach you something—mostly about why we can’t have nice things.
33 Terrible Maps For Some Geographical Giggles






























You’ve seen the chaos now, so let’s debrief. Kicking off with the Oregon-less “organ donor” gag, the gallery sets the tone: geography as wordplay, not worldview. From there we detoured into a pigs-versus-camels showdown, which doubles as a weirdly informative geography meme about climate and culture. Cast-iron “United Skillets” proved America can be organized by cookware, while Britain’s “electricity from the wall” diagram made anti-jokes feel like science.
Hex-grid United States? Beautiful, cursed, and exactly what happens when someone plays too much Civ V. The “everybody was Kung Fu fighting” world map took song lyrics literally, just like the Beach Boys regional census that followed—sociology by surf rock. We even hit geopolitics in some of these terrible maps via the “unfriendly to Russia vs. safe tap water” comparison that lands like a roast disguised as a choropleth.
Two favorites for the map nerds: MLB teams replanted by latitude across Europe and Africa (a mind-bender for anyone who forgets how south the U.S. sits), and the continent-rotation that conjures the American Duck once you can’t unsee it. Funny maps, sure—but each one smuggles in a small lesson about scale, projection, or how easily our brains accept a tidy visual story.
If you’re bookmarking a few of these terrible maps, keep the skillet states for your group chat chef, the hex-bee United States for game-night friends, and the tap-water geopolitics for your coworker who lives in the data viz trenches. There’s a fine line between bad maps and brilliant satire; this set struts right down the middle.
Priya Coleman once got lost in a museum gift shop map aisle and has been making geography jokes ever since.