50 Pics Without Context That Get Weirder And Weirder The Longer You Look At Them, As Shared On This Online Group (New Pics)
Weirder than weird. Stranger than strange. Fiction has nothing on reality when the latter looks like the stuff shared on the r/hmmm subreddit. Reality wins the bizarreness department, hands down. To show you exactly what we mean, we’ve collected some of the most powerful photos shared on the online community that have literally no context and get funnier and more peculiar the longer you look at them.
If you’ve ever wanted to take a casual stroll through The Twilight Zone and Alice’s Wonderland, this is your chance. Posts that make you ‘hmmm’ start off by bombarding your nervous system to create a mounting sense of confusion. Then comes the barely-containable giggling as you upvote your favorite pics and send them to your friends and coworkers.
In the mood for some more scrumptious and hmmm-tious content when you’re done devouring this delicious digital course? We’ve got you covered, Pandas! Our team here at Bored Panda has featured the subreddit in all of its glory a number of times before. Check out our previous articles about the community here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
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A whopping 1.92 million people follow the r/hmmm subreddit, and we can’t wait for that number to hit a solid, round 2 million soon. The online community puts deep absurdity first and raises contextless humor to an art form.
For instance, every single post has to have the word ‘hmmm’ in the title. And God forbid that you use an uppercase ‘H’ instead of a lowercase ‘h’! We can barely imagine the horror.
“hmmms are textless images that make you think about the context, do a double take, invoke a deeper meaning, or just leave you thinking about how or why they exist. As long as they give you a good solid hmmm... why would that bear be in a cubicle… hmmms should be aesthetic and meaningful, avoid anything that is merely r/mildlyinteresting,” the moderator team running the show explains.
Meanwhile, if you plan on posting stuff on the subreddit, then you should probably read the full list of rules. Thankfully, r/hmmm has an incredibly detailed FAQ that deals with the nitty-gritty details of what’s expected from members, what’s (dis)allowed, and what type of humor is best shared on other subreddits.
During a friendly earlier interview, Bored Panda had a chat about the sub with the head moderator of r/hmmm, u/CosmicKeys. They told us about the history of the community and the changes that came along throughout the years.
"The idea for /r/hmmm was to create a highly curated subreddit with a quality bar where all the pictures are interesting, meaningful, aesthetic, and shine a light on how random image culture on the internet had become its own genre of art. I think we are popular because we maintain this quality bar," the head mod shared with us.
"The titles are all 'hmmm' because it means you can experience the image without someone forcing their personal interpretation onto it in the form of a title. Whether it's funny or sad is up to you to determine. It is also about purity. In order for your post to go through, you need to submit to a rigid tradition. People willing to do that generally care enough to post excellent content,” they explained to Bored Panda.
"/r/hmmm was founded in 2016 by users from snoonet irc. It was technically created in 2008, but had no activity up until that point, so 2016 is the real creation date," they said that, technically, the subreddit’s founding date is very different from the one we can see online.
It was bad spacing on the instruction. It said "Penis required for voting" when it should have said "Pen is required for voting"
This was in Belgium ^^ The guy made the news. His statement was "politicians 'drop their pants' for votes, so I guess I can drop mine while voting". In French, the idiomatic expression "baisser son pantalon" roughly means doing whatever is necessary to get what you want, even if it's humiliating. (To be precise it was in Flanders, but the expression is the same in Flemish "zijn broek laten zakken").
uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...buddy...whatcha doooooooooooooooooooooooooin'?
I'm trying to imagine just what the h3ll is going on behind the curtain. Any ideas?
Actually, that's going to be a lot of people's opinions during the upcoming election.
"If I do this nobody will notice the dead guy in the ziplocked storage case"
Early voting started in Vermont, I guess? Bernie Sanders being next in line gives it away :p
"I would post daily pictures while chat was going for people to laugh at oddities from different corners of the internet. That grew into a large collection, so /r/hmmm was born. The name comes from a thread that would appear occasionally on 4chan, and the content was inspired by a website called spaceghetto," u/CosmicKeys said.
"The subreddit is about obscure and strange images, so over time as certain types of images have gone from obscure to popular we've made rules to exclude them," they hinted that, as internet culture changes, so does the sub.
Meanwhile, comedy writer Ariane Sherine also shared her thoughts with Bored Panda about bizarre internet content. “The weirder and more surprising the photo, the more likely it is to make us laugh,” she told us.
“I tend to laugh the most at animals pulling human expressions while doing crazy things!” she shared what gets her giggling the hardest.
According to the comedy expert, humor is instantaneous. Meanwhile, context is essential only if there’s a total lack of it and if that limits the audience’s ability to ‘get’ the joke. As such, if you can’t relate to a joke, meme, or image, you might end up asking for someone to explain them to you. And that kills a lot of the comedic effect.
“Context is important only if we’re unlikely to get a joke otherwise, as I think the sooner we get a joke, the funnier we find it. If it takes us a while then that initial shock and surprise is delayed and so we’re less likely to laugh and more likely to go ‘oh, I get it now!’” Ariane said.
“Some people are born with funny bones, but those who aren’t so lucky could watch a lot of great standup comedy and try to emulate the timing and pace. There are also some excellent comedy courses available online,” the comedy writer noted that everyone can improve their comedic timing with a bit of research and practice.
Pretty sure if you hit those old Nokias with a rock, the rock would break. This is probably the strongest wall in existence
Note: this post originally had 111 images. It’s been shortened to the top 50 images based on user votes.
i lOve these. always my favorite articles, make me laugh so hard
Danger: Poland is being invaded by a duck. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s9RuJK0Hnz0
i lOve these. always my favorite articles, make me laugh so hard
Danger: Poland is being invaded by a duck. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s9RuJK0Hnz0
