2025 will probably be remembered for a lot of heavy things — big political spats, platform shakeups, and a steady stream of bad-news headlines. But if you peek behind the noise, you’ll find a less serious, stubbornly human thread: people joking, tripping, and turning embarrassment into entertainment. Two staff roundups (one collecting 71 “hysterical fails,” another curating the year’s funniest tweets) pulled together what the internet does best when it wants to cheer itself up.
BuzzFeed’s Kelley Greene assembled a gallery of 71 antics and missteps — photos and short posts that run the gamut from kitchen disasters to public-transport humiliations. Alana Valko, also at BuzzFeed, did the long, patient scroll through hundreds of tweets to pick the funniest one-liners, awkward workplace moments, and the kind of tiny human defeats that make great punchlines. Both lists are, intentionally, small mercy: three lines, one photo, and suddenly the day feels lighter.
Why curated fails and tweet roundups still matter
There’s something oddly comforting about a well-curated list of human mess-ups. These pieces do three things at once: they archive the Internet’s small absurdities, they reward creativity (or spectacular bad luck), and they create a shared cultural shorthand — a meme, a phrase, a single screengrab people will riff on for months.
But the mechanics behind those roundups are shifting. Platforms and tools changed fast this year. AI-powered products and content-discovery experiments are altering what surfaces to editors and what goes viral. That’s worth keeping in mind if you treat these listicles as neutral reflections of “what happened” — the selection process is influenced by algorithms, platform policies, and, increasingly, legal debates about content ownership and deepfakes. For a snapshot of one of the debates around AI and platform content, see reporting on OpenAI’s Sora landing on Android and the brand-rights conversation. And for how powerful search tools might change curation — letting researchers and editors surface past posts from private archives — check out the piece on Gemini’s Deep Research integration.
A quick tour through the laughs (without spoiling the best bits)
What struck me going through the two lists wasn’t just the quality of the jokes — it was the variety. Some favorites were low-effort and universal: autocorrect disasters, PTA-level petty revenge, or a caption that turns everyday failure into a one-liner. Others were exquisitely specific: a ride-operator’s signage typo, a pastry that somehow held a grudge, or a “final price when you buy three buy one get two free” ad that seems purposely designed to torture math teachers.
There were also genre moments: workplace microhumiliation tweets that land like a tiny existential crisis, and photo-fails that are pure physical comedy (think beach-day mishaps or a car trunk that clearly had a different plan). The humor is durable because it’s human-scale — nothing slick, just the kind of embarrassment we can silently vicariously enjoy without needing to pick a side.
One small domestic observation: these lists are a reminder of how platforms bleed into one another. Screenshots from X (formerly Twitter) sit next to Threads and Bsky posts; creators post a win on one network, then watch it travel like wildfire across others. That cross-pollination is part of why viral moments feel so immediate, and why roundups can mine weeks’ worth of joy in under five minutes of reading.
A note on access: not every corner of the internet is equally open. A cycling site’s “best fails” video — promising 30 minutes of chaotic mountain-bike footage — turned into a dead end for some readers when the page returned a security block. It’s a good reminder that part of the internet’s charm is also its fragility: paywalls, bot filters, and regional locks can interrupt the flow of culturally relevant content at any moment.
What the lists say about us
Collecting the funniest tweets and fails is more than light entertainment. It’s cultural triage: when days are messy, people use humor to make sense of them. These roundups are a map of what we choose to laugh about — the little human slips that feel, crucially, forgivable. They also reveal how quickly comedy evolves: the format shifted from long, threaded jokes to single-image gags and three-line captions optimized for resharing.
If you want to follow the creators behind these moments, the roundups often link back to original posts. That loop — from creator to viral clip to editor’s list to reader — is how internet folklore gets written. And for editors, curators and casual scrollers alike, that folklore matters because it’s the part of the web that keeps us smiling between the news cycles.
I’ll leave you with a small test: scroll either of those BuzzFeed roundups for five minutes and try not to at least grin. If you fail, consider it part of the assignment.