BuzzFeed Shares 35 Funny Text Messages

funny moments are sometimes funny precisely because they shouldn't be preserved
The piece trades on the paradox that humor often lives in the ephemeral, yet here it is, archived.
Mark

So this is just a list of funny text messages?

Mimi

Yes—thirty-five of them. BuzzFeed collected exchanges they found genuinely amusing.

Mark

Who submitted them? Where did they come from?

Mimi

The source material doesn't specify. That's actually the gap here.

Luke

Right. We don't know if these are user submissions, if BuzzFeed staff pulled them from their own phones, if they're crowdsourced from social media. The sourcing is completely opaque.

Mimi

Which is pretty standard for this type of content. The humor is the point, not the provenance.

Mark

Does it matter where they came from?

Luke

It matters if you're trying to understand what this piece actually is. Is it reporting? No. Is it curation? Yes. But curation of what, exactly?

Mimi

Moments of human communication that landed as funny. That's enough.

Mark

And people find this valuable?

Mimi

Apparently enough that BuzzFeed publishes these regularly. It's a reliable format.

Luke

The confidence level on this is marked as low, which makes sense. There's nothing to verify. It's subjective judgment presented as content.

Mark

So what's the story?

Mimi

There isn't one, really. It's entertainment, not reporting.

  • Thirty-five text exchanges, selected for their ability to trigger laughter on repeat, have been packaged into a BuzzFeed list that asks, with knowing irony, to be destroyed.
  • The tension is built into the premise: these are moments that were never meant to outlast the conversation, yet someone screenshotted them, saved them, and now millions may read them.
  • No reporting, no verification, no interviews — the only editorial act here is selection, the quiet judgment that this exchange is funnier than that one.
  • The piece lands as a mirror held up to everyday digital life, where the funniest things are often the most accidental, and the most embarrassing moments become the most shareable.

In the ongoing human project of finding laughter in the ordinary, BuzzFeed has assembled thirty-five text message exchanges chosen for their capacity to amuse repeatedly — not as journalism, but as curation, which is its own quiet art. The piece arrives in the tradition of the internet list: no investigation, no sources beyond the screenshots themselves, only the editorial judgment that these particular moments of human miscommunication or perfect timing are worth preserving. There is something gently paradoxical in the title's plea to delete the evidence, given that preservation is precisely what the collection performs. It is a small monument to the comedy that lives between people, in the gaps where language almost works.

BuzzFeed has published a collection of thirty-five text message exchanges, chosen for one quality above all others: they are reliably funny, the kind of thing that makes you laugh again even after you've already seen it.

The title frames the whole enterprise with self-aware irony — a plea to delete the evidence, attached to an article designed to preserve it forever. That contradiction is part of the joke, and part of the point. Humor of this kind lives in embarrassment, in the moment a conversation went somewhere no one intended.

There is no reporting here in any traditional sense. The editorial work is curation: someone identified these exchanges as genuinely amusing and assembled them for an audience that will likely recognize something of themselves in the absurdity. It is the internet's most native content form — the list, the roundup, the collection of things that exist and happen to be funny.

What the piece quietly argues, without arguing anything at all, is that comedy is not rare. It lives in the ordinary medium of text conversation, in small failures of communication and perfectly timed wrong turns. The screenshots are monuments to accidental art — moments that were never meant to last, lasting anyway.

BuzzFeed published a collection of thirty-five text message exchanges selected for their comedic value. The piece, titled with a plea to remove the evidence, presents conversations that the publication's editors found reliably amusing—the kind of exchanges that apparently trigger laughter upon repeated recollection.

The framing suggests these are texts that land differently each time you encounter them. There's no narrative arc here, no investigation, no reporting in the traditional sense. What exists instead is a curation: someone at BuzzFeed scrolled through submissions or their own archives, identified moments of genuine humor in the mundane medium of text conversation, and assembled them for readers who might recognize themselves in the absurdity.

This is the internet's dominant form of content aggregation—the list, the collection, the "here are things that exist and they are funny." It requires no reporting, no sources beyond the texts themselves, no verification beyond the judgment that yes, this exchange is amusing. The title's self-aware plea—"Please Delete This"—signals the embarrassment that often accompanies humor, the sense that funny moments are sometimes funny precisely because they shouldn't be preserved, yet here they are, preserved anyway.

The piece exists in a category of content that has become central to how digital media operates: the roundup of user-generated or crowdsourced material, packaged with minimal editorial intervention beyond selection and presentation. It is not journalism in the sense of investigation or reporting. It is curation, which is its own form of editorial work, though one that requires no interviews, no fact-checking, no sources beyond the material itself.

For readers, the appeal is straightforward. These are moments of human communication that broke through the ordinary noise—texts that made someone laugh hard enough to screenshot, to save, to share. The collection offers permission to find humor in the everyday, to recognize that comedy lives in the spaces between people, in the small failures of communication and the unexpected turns a conversation can take when someone says something perfectly timed or perfectly wrong.

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