In 2010 there was no screaming digital landscape of coping guides for lost Millenials, no T op Five Panic Attacks You Have Actually Had In A Supermarket, no Top Ten Reasons Gen X Hates You And Refuses To Employ You. These were dispersed amongst personal stories that now, in the height of Buzzfeed and Thought Catalog, could be dismissed as clickbait⎯titles such as “Why I’ll Never Be An Adult” back then somehow weighed more.

Back then, it was just Brosh telling stories about frustrating and relatable moments from her life: close calls with the little bags of Nope that are spiders, the Sneaky Hate Spiral, Seven Games You Can Play With A Brick.Īs time progressed, the stories became anecdotes from her childhood⎯painfully funny incidents of minor disaster. This was around 2010 it even might have been kind of before internet humor mavericks (like Justin Valmassoi from Animals Talking In All Caps) and adorable animals were rewarded with publishing deals for their hours of producing-hilarious-things-for-free. Every line a gunshot of hilarity, every illustration impossibly succinct in their Microsoft Paint cubism. It was just going viral, just becoming catchphrase, just beginning to appear on everyone’s Facebook newsfeed. When I first started reading Allie Brosh’s webcomic, it had not quite yet become Internet Canon.

Like, I can’t talk about this book without saying that I’ve come quite a way with Hyperbole And A Half.

The book around sixty thousand of us internet creeps have been waiting for. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Allie hyperbole and a half