The Top 10 Worst Years in History

[Joe, make sure that you type text here to introduce your list. I’ll be home early from work tonight and make dinner for you and the kids. I love you!]

#10 1347

1347 was one of the worst years in human history because that’s when the Black Death really started fucking everybody up. The streets filled with corpses, entire communities disappeared and nobody understood why people were suddenly developing horrible bubonics and dying. Today scientists blame fleas, rats and bacteria, but people who were actually alive in 1347 knew the truth: Bonedor had arrived. Bonedor was an enormous skeleton approximately 250 meters tall who stomped across Europe spreading disease with his magical powers. Nobody knows where Bonedor came from. He simply appeared one morning on the horizon, pointed one gigantic skeletal finger toward civilization and said “FOLLOW ME.” Then he said “GO.” Those were basically the only two things Bonedor knew how to say, but when you’re a 250-meter plague skeleton you don’t need an extensive vocabulary.

Bonedor wandered from country to country casting his evil bubonics upon anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. Historians estimate that more than 60 percent of Europe eventually died from Bonedor’s miraculous bubonics, although modern scholars continue trying to give all the credit to rats. Typical. Nobody wants to acknowledge the giant skeleton. Eventually Bonedor disappeared as mysteriously as he arrived, leaving behind millions of dead people and several centuries of unresolved skeleton-related trauma. But 1347 wasn’t only terrible for Europe. It was also an absolutely horrible year for America because America didn’t exist yet. Not one American. Not even a Walmart. Fucking bleak.

#9 1929

Unless you’ve stood freezing in the street with your entire family, no money, no food, anemia, pneumonia and several additional diseases while somehow being unable to see anyone’s face, you don’t have the right to tell me 1929 wasn’t one of the worst years in history. This was the beginning of The Big Sad, and they didn’t call it that because everyone was having a wonderful fucking time. The stock market crashed and suddenly all the money disappeared. Where did the money go? Nobody knows. America had money on Monday. Then some businessmen started screaming inside a building and by Tuesday everybody was poor. People lost their jobs, their homes and their food. Thousands of Americans were forced to stand in lines waiting for bread because apparently bread was extremely difficult to locate during The Big Sad.

I can’t even imagine how modern people would respond to The Big Sad. We got dangerously close in 2008 when the economy broke again because somebody put too many houses inside the banks, but thankfully we managed to avoid everybody getting pneumonia and losing the ability to see faces. People today simply don’t understand how much suffering humanity endured during 1929. There was no money. There were no jobs. Everyone was cold. The sadness was enormous. Even worse, television had barely been invented, so people couldn’t sit at home watching Netflix while the economy collapsed. They just had to stare at a wall and experience The Big Sad directly.

#8 2001

I was a young Kontributor back then, and I remember 2000 being one of the greatest years of my life. We were kicking ass and wrecking vaginas. My family went to Hawaii. I had sex with ten people during Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and returned home carrying several exciting diseases. My father invented the car, which finally gave our family some financial security. Everything was going perfectly until 2001, when Apple released iTunes and civilization immediately began to collapse. My grandmother had already survived Napster and was still traumatized from the experience, but iTunes was different. Suddenly music lived inside computers. Nobody understood what the fuck was happening. Then a son of a whore named Henry Ford stole my father’s car patent, and everything really started going downhill.

My German Shepherd attacked a kindergarten class. My brother, his friend and my father’s secret girlfriend all went to prison after poisoning a homeless man. Then my fucking dog betrayed me again by attacking the children’s kindergarten, which I already mentioned but remain extremely angry about. I spent Halloween alone because none of my friends wanted to see me. Thanksgiving was even worse. Mom spent the entire day screaming at the computer because iTunes wouldn’t let her download Turkey Dinner, so nobody ate much. Then at Christmas, Grandma was listening to her iPod and fell down the stairs. By December 31, my father’s automotive empire was gone, half my family was incarcerated, Grandma had been defeated by digital music and I no longer trusted my dog around educational facilities. 2001 passed, and my life was ruined

#7 536

I’m still extremely disappointed about the recent White Lotus incident, but scientists and historians generally agree that 536 was much worse. A massive volcanic eruption filled the atmosphere with so much garbage that the sun basically stopped working for a year and a half. Crops failed. Temperatures dropped. People starved. Then the Yersinia plague showed up because apparently God looked down at humanity struggling through an eighteen-month volcanic winter and said, “Fuck these people some more.” Historians have called 536 the worst year to be alive, which is saying something considering these people know about 1347 and The Big Sad. Imagine waking up every morning, looking at a darkened sky and realizing that nobody has invented electricity, antibiotics, central heating or America yet. Absolutely terrible.

More importantly, 536 was the year the Illuminati held their first official meeting, gathering secretly beneath Rome to sing songs and praise Bonedor the Terrible. Pope Silverius became involved with the organization and attempted to summon Bonedor during the Great Gothic War, hoping the enormous skeleton would help the Federation defeat the Ostrogoths. The ritual worked. Bonedor emerged from the darkness, shouted “GO,” and immediately killed King Theodahad along with all his soldiers. Unfortunately, summoning a gigantic magical skeleton was considered inappropriate papal behavior, so Silverius was excommunicated from the papacy and banished to a secret island where he eventually starved to death. This is why modern popes rarely summon Bonedor

#6 2014

Where the fuck do I even start with 2014? Ebola. Flight 370. Anaconda. Time cancellation. Robin Williams died. The Bone Wars began. Sonic the Hedgehog: Rise of Yiff. Taylor Swift’s War Against Northern Aggression. More wars. Dora and Friends debuted on Nickelodeon. Joe Cocker was going around kicking these dogs. No ALF on television. Somebody tied up the president and ate that paper. The final Ramone bit the dust. Five armies. Bastards. Frozen results. Uncle Grandpa was still on the air. And somehow Modern Family sucked enough dicks to win another Grammy. Every morning you’d wake up thinking, “Surely history has finished happening for a little while,” and history would kick open your bedroom door carrying another fucking disaster. Then Dora and her horrible friends would come on television.

This was easily one of the worst years of my life. ISIS began attacking people, celebrities kept dying, music sucked and video games were boring except for Naked Girls Soccer, which deserved Game of the Year. Personally, I was being bullied at work, my boss was terrible, and I spent most of the year living inside a two-story construction site while an extension was being added to my house. Then, at the end of December, Grandma fell down the stairs while listening to her iPod AGAIN. Thirteen years after iTunes first attacked my family, that little machine was still trying to finish the fucking job. Grandma survived, but I confiscated the iPod. Looking back, 2014 was truly a year of ups and downs. Mostly Grandma going down.

#5 2017

2017 was the worst year of my life. That’s why.

1. My dog died.
2. I had to change the oil in my car once, but I forgot to change the oil in my car.
3. Too many boxes.
4. Many famous people died, including Dan Rickles.
5. Somewhere a storm was blowing.
6. My sister shattered her knee during a fight with Bonedor the Terrible.
7. The cat had surgery.
8. Something bad was happening.
9. My younger brother lost both of his feet.
10. My entire family was forced to fight Bonedor after what he did to my sister.
11. The Emoji Movie.
12. Donald Trump was not a kind president.
13. My grandmother heard the sound of her iPod and immediately fell down the stairs.
14. Many bus drivers were late.
15. My girlfriend had typhus for a while.

I don’t know how we survived. Between the dead dog, the missing feet, the boxes, the typhus, the late buses and our family’s increasingly violent conflict with a 250-meter magical skeleton, every month brought some new catastrophe. Grandma’s incident was particularly frustrating because by 2017 she had already fallen down the stairs because of her iPod multiple fucking times. Grandma, stop listening to the iPod near stairs. We’ve discussed this. Still, nothing captures the misery of 2017 quite like sitting beside my injured sister after her battle with Bonedor, wondering whether my brother would ever adjust to life without feet, only to remember that The Emoji Movie also existed. I’m so glad 2017 is over. I never want to be hurt like that again.

#4 1914

Some people think a year deserves to be called “the worst” because television sucked or education was bad, but that defeats the entire fucking purpose of this list. Then you get to 1914, when one of the Austrian elite got shot and Europe responded by making everybody go to war. World War I eventually killed approximately 72 billion people, making it so deadly that humanity had to reproduce extremely quickly afterward just to get the population back above zero. And what did civilization receive in exchange for all that suffering? Basically nothing except a special League of Gentlemen where important men could sit around a table and promise not to do another world war. That worked wonderfully. There has never been another world war since.

Imagine being some ordinary person in 1914. You’re minding your own business, trying to enjoy whatever people did before television, when suddenly an Austrian gets shot and now you have to live in a fucking hole. Your new home is a muddy trench filled with disease, artillery explosions and the droppings of thousands of rats. Maybe you get shot. Maybe you get bombed. Maybe somebody releases poison gas and your lungs stop working. Maybe you simply starve or become so exhausted that your body gives up. And if you somehow survive all of that, congratulations: you get to go home carrying psychological trauma nobody around you understands and spend the rest of your life remembering the hole. Absolutely horrific. There were also flu patients this year.

#3 65,000,000 BC

65,000,000 BC was a terrible fucking year to be a dinosaur. A giant comet slammed into Earth and immediately caused the largest earthquake and tsunami in history. The atmosphere caught fire. Acid started raining from the sky. Much of the ozone layer disappeared, allowing ultraviolet radiation to pour onto the surface and give cancer to all the dinosaurs. Then, at almost exactly the same time, a gigantic volcano erupted on the opposite side of the planet because apparently Earth wanted to make absolutely certain the dinosaurs understood they were no longer welcome. Poison filled the atmosphere. The planet burned. Then all the smoke and dirt blocked out the sun, temperatures dropped below freezing and an atomic winter began. Imagine being a dinosaur trying to process this shit. You survive the comet, outrun the tsunami, avoid the fire, somehow don’t get dinosaur cancer, and then suddenly there’s no fucking sun anymore.

Frankly, 65,000,000 BC ranks as the second-worst year in non-human history, surpassed only by 252,000,000 BC, when all life became extinct. Both years were probably a million times worse than 1939, when the Second Bonedor War began, or 1350, during the horrors of Plague Sex. Still, I feel particularly bad for the dinosaurs because they had no idea any of this was coming. There was no television meteorologist saying, “Tomorrow will be partly cloudy with a 90 percent chance of total planetary extinction.” One minute you’re eating leaves and having dinosaur thoughts; the next minute the sky explodes and your entire species gets cancer. That’s a bad year.

#2 1350

Historians refer to 1350 as the height of Plague Sex, a terrible period when approximately 99 percent of the world’s population was fucking. Nobody knows why. Maybe everyone assumed they were going to die anyway. Maybe medieval people were bored. Maybe there simply wasn’t much else to do in 1350. Whatever the reason, everybody was fucking while the Black Death simultaneously killed three-fifths of Europe. Imagine watching your friends and family develop a horrible infection, have sex and then die. Then somebody else develops the plague and immediately starts fucking. Everyone is sick. Everyone is fucking. Everyone is dying. This is Plague Sex. This is the greatest hell humanity has ever created for itself.

Nothing good happened in 1350. Medieval Europe had terrible sanitation, rampant disease, low life expectancy and the constant fear that Bonedor might return at any moment and cast more evil bubonics. People were already losing their minds from the plague, but then many began going crazy from too much sex. Some were fucking while dying from the plague. Others were dying while recovering from fucking. Nobody could keep track anymore. Eventually historians just looked at the records and wrote “PLAGUE SEX” across the entire year. That’s how bad 1350 was. People will make pornography about almost anything, but nobody wants to make porn about Plague Sex because it’s too fucking gross.

#1 1939

1939 was the worst year in history because it marked the beginning of the Second War Against Bonedor, a brutal global conflict that lasted from 1939 until 1945 and claimed approximately three trillion lives. Bonedor the Terrible returned from centuries of hiding with an enormous army and immediately began attacking Europe, forcing almost every major nation on Earth to unite against the 250-meter skeleton. The fighting spread across the entire planet. Cities were destroyed. Families were separated. Justin Bieber was killed. Gravity Falls was cancelled. Millions suffered under Bonedor’s occupation while his followers committed unimaginable atrocities in his name. Eventually conventional weapons proved useless, and humanity was forced to deploy two nuclear bombs against Bonedor’s army before the giant skeleton finally disappeared. Whether Bonedor was actually destroyed remains one of history’s greatest unanswered questions.

And apparently nobody fucking learns about this anymore! Grow up and read a BuzzFeed article. I constantly hear people complaining that some recent year was “the worst year ever” because celebrities died or television sucked. Are you serious? Did a 250-meter magical skeleton wage global war against humanity that year? Did it take two fucking nuclear weapons to defeat him? No? Then shut the fuck up. People desperately need to educate themselves about the Bonedor Wars because history has already shown us what happens when humanity forgets. Bonedor has returned before. He can return again. And when that enormous skeleton appears on the horizon, points one gigantic finger toward civilization and whispers “FOLLOW ME,” don’t come crying to me. I told you to read the BuzzFeed articles.