There is a survey tradition in cartography that dates back centuries, and somewhere in that tradition, on a day that we will never be able to identify but deeply respect, a surveyor looked at a perfectly unremarkable body of water, thought about it for a moment, and wrote “Stupid Lake.” Not angry lake. Not troubled lake. Stupid Lake, committed to the map in ink that has outlasted the surveyor, the survey equipment, and probably several of the governments that presided over the naming. Sad place names are not modern discoveries. They are ancient ones, accumulated across centuries of documentation by people who were apparently not always in the mood to be poetic about it.
The city planner was going through it.
The vacation nobody asked for, preserved in Google Maps forever.
At least it owns it.
My career path, but scenic.
Skip the ferry. You can feel it from home.
Cry here, it's already salty.
Misery loves company, and apparently also geology.
Imagine putting this on a resume.
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Funny map names occupy a territory that other comedy formats can’t fully access, which is the territory of the permanently official. A tweet can be deleted. A meme loses its context. But a name on a map requires an act of governance to change, and in many cases that act hasn’t happened and won’t happen, because Disappointment Island is Disappointment Island and at some point the paperwork to rename it becomes more trouble than the name is worth. These places carry their designations through time with an authority that the original namer never intended them to have. Whoever named Misery Islands did not anticipate that Misery Islands would one day appear in a gallery alongside Misery Rock, Misery Shoal, Little Misery Island, and Misery Ledge, forming a complete ecosystem of coordinated despair that suggests either a very bad week or a very committed aesthetic choice.
Weird geographical names in the water feature category are particularly well-represented in this collection, and the reason is probably that lakes and ponds require more naming than other features, because there are a lot of them, they need to be distinguished from each other, and after you’ve used the names of every local dignitary and geographical descriptor available, you’re left with the honest options. Bowl of Tears. Depressed Lake. Suffering Pond. Frustration Lake. These names are not funny because they are wrong. They are funny because they are right, in the way that all truly resonant names are right: they capture something that was always there and hadn’t been said yet. The lake was already a little sad. The surveyor just confirmed it.
The streets category in this gallery is where the comedy lands closest, because street addresses are personal in a way that bodies of water are not. A lake being named Stupid is an abstract comedy. Living on Loser Lane is a daily experience with real consequences for real estate value, self-introduction at dinner parties, and the psychological experience of writing your own address on official documents. Friendless Lane, Why Me Lord Lane, and the Road to Nowhere with its own labeled terminus are streets where the mail has to be delivered with a straight face, and somewhere in each of these neighborhoods there is a person who has made peace with the address and a person who has not.
If this gallery has sent you to Google Maps to look for more, funny place names content is a rich companion category where the Useless Islands have colleagues on every continent and the cartographic record of human emotional experience is more extensive than anyone has fully mapped. Strange geographical oddities broadly belong right beside it. And for anyone who found Pointless Mountain most resonant as a life philosophy, absurdist geography humor is a space where the mountain has been climbed, reviewed, and found to be exactly as described.
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Alex Thompson has been chronicling internet culture and meme phenomena for nearly seven years. Starting at CollegeHumor and later becoming lead meme editor at Mashable, Alex has covered everything from vintage internet memes like Rickrolling to recent viral events such as Corn Kid and Grimace Shake. With a keen eye for what connects and entertains digital audiences, Alex writes with humor, relatability, and deep knowledge of online culture. At Thunder Dungeon, Alex is the go-to source for meme analysis, viral breakdowns, and internet nostalgia.
