About HumorLabs

About HumorLabs

HumorLabs is the bastard son of TopFive.com and The Top 5 List, which sprung to life in January of 1994 and was the first all-original humor source on the Internet. Some 20 years later, we’re still at it, cranking out new comedy content every weekday.

TopFive creator Chris White is the inventor of online User-Generated Content and Crowd-Sourced Content, having come up with the concept for newsletters in January of 1994, then applying it to websites as well in May of 1996. Today, after nearly two decades, HumorLabs.com’s content is still entirely user-generated. Every weekday a different topic is sent to some 200 hand-picked amateur comedy writers, who then send back their ideas, and a moderator compiles the best ones into a finished list.

As of July 1, 2013, we’ve published over 17,000 “top 10″ lists in all.

When the list was first started, it consisted of about a dozen friends who published a 5-item list to share amongst themselves — hence the numeric inconsistency in our moniker. Over the years, millions of people have read our lists. We’ve appeared in countless major magazines and newspapers, and on hundreds of TV and radio shows worldwide. Many celebrities have dropped in to guest-moderate lists for us: Pat Sajak, Michael Moore, Alex Trebek, Mark Cuban, Smash Mouth, Asia Carerra, Scott Adams and Ed Begley Jr., to name a few.

More than 1000 writers have been a part of TopFive/HumorLabs over the years. We never intended on making this a long-term enterprise, and were pretty stunned when we hit the 10-year mark — that’s an eternity for an online business. Now as we approach 20 years, we’re still just as amazed and grateful for such a large and appreciative audience.

Free subscriptions are available for our regular edition, offering a taste of what we publish every day, and we also have a premium edition for those who want the complete day’s content.