The Comedy in the Amazon Review Section Is Officially Funnier Than Most Sitcoms Currently on the Air

The Amazon review section has, over the past decade, accidentally become one of the strangest literary genres on the internet. Most product reviews used to be functional. The reviewer described the product, indicated whether it worked, and moved on. That model still exists, but next to it, a separate genre has developed where the reviewer has decided to perform, to tell a story, to commit a small act of language that the platform was never designed to host. The funny amazon reviews filling galleries like this are the wild-grown fruit of that genre.

What makes the form particularly satisfying is that nobody is being paid to write them. There is no incentive structure pushing somebody to describe their patio heater as having “clit around post” instead of “fits around post.” That typo is the work of a free human being, posting in earnest, who has now produced a piece of internet content that will outlive everybody involved. The hilarious amazon reviews emerging from this corner of the internet are essentially folk art: anonymous, unfunded, and weirdly enduring.

There’s also a strong recurring pattern of reviewers misunderstanding the assignment in productive ways. The reviewer who rated a book three stars because they hadn’t read it yet but wanted to share what they assumed it was about. The reviewer who took five stars to mean “the product caused me to fall over backwards immediately.” The amazon review humor in this gallery thrives on this exact failure to follow conventions, because conventions would have ruined the comedy.

The broader thing this whole genre captures, when you sit back from the typos, is that Amazon has accidentally built one of the largest archives of casual, candid public writing ever assembled. Millions of regular people, in moments of mild excitement or mild frustration about a recent purchase, sit down and produce a small piece of text that almost nobody will read carefully. Some of those texts are functional. Some of them are, by accident, small masterpieces, and the internet has gotten very good at surfacing the masterpieces.

What’s almost touching is how often the reviewers in this gallery seem completely unaware that anybody will ever read their work. The Australian using slang that no overseas customer would parse. The British retiree describing a constipation remedy with the level of detail you’d expect from a five-act play. These people are writing for an audience of nobody, which is somehow why the writing is so good. There’s no incentive to perform. There’s no incentive to filter. The result is honest in a way that most online writing is not.

We are choosing to celebrate this. Mr. M Bland did not know we were watching. Mr. M Bland is, retroactively, an artist.