It’s November 23, 1963. We’re standing on a crowded street in Dallas. The presidential motorcade comes round the bend onto Elm Street. In the crowd, a man with yellow skin and bug eyes stands a
few feet back from the crowd. He’s serene. Happy even. There’s a shot.
Two days later, Lee Harvey Oswald falls outside Dallas Police Headquarters. Behind him, the yellow man watches over the scene, his unibrow curved up on both ends. His name is Bert (yes, that Bert), and according to Dino Ignacio, this Muppet is history’s greatest villain.
Ignacio’s website, Bert Is Evil, uses fabricated evidence to pin vile deeds on the grouchy half of Sesame Street’s famous Odd Couple in felt. Ignacio (and his fans) used Photoshop and the poetic touch of a USENET conspiracy nut to vilify the puppet by making him victimize his friends from the Street.
Bert Is Evil claimed it “collected incriminating images and documents that prove that Bert is not the lovable harmless geek he so successfully makes us think he is.” The front page featured a blurry mugshot with links to evidence and interviews with his associates like Kermit, Elmo, and others.
Ignacio’s site claimed Bert was corrupting his fellow puppets. In a post titled Bert takes Ernie to a Nudie Bar, Bert forces his childlike roommate to accept lap dances from “all the ladies.” This is all a little much for Ernie. He freaks out. Cries “Wah! Wah! Wah!” all the way home.
The “evidence” is spurious at best. It’s all speculation and tawdry schlock. Where are the primary sources? The photos appear to be crude Photoshops. In a post titled One of the few pictures of Bert with Mr. Hooper, Bert lurks behind the elderly Hooper in the General Store like a jaundiced Dracula. The text reads:
This photo was taken only days before the death of Mr. Hooper. Bert’s evil intent so obviously emanates from his eyes. We think he did it. What do you think?
No demands for your trust. Accusations. Whispers in the web. Dino Ignacio’s just asking questions.
Ignacio was 20 years old when he coded his first website in 1996. He called it FractalCow. “It was a collection of mini-sites I made,” he says. “Online comics, poetry, HTML experiments, and random weirdness.” Portal sites were designed for users to set as their homepage (the first page that loads when you open a web browser). People didn’t live in their browsers back then, then so it was considered a high-value placement since it was the first thing a user saw after dialing in. Bert Is Evil was just one component in what Ignacio hoped would be a web empire. Or a fun hobby. He was a fresh high school graduate, so he was looking to have a laugh.
“The Internet was new, and there weren’t too many comedy sites yet,” he says. Like Bert Is Evil, many features on Fractal Cow were offbeat and a little naughty. “I remember doing a bunch of cool web comics called Suicide Boy, about a boy who kept on trying to kill himself. I made a horrible website called CatsAsTrophies… A collection of poetry juxtaposed with images of road-killed cats.”
Getting a website online in 1996 wasn’t easy.
“The tool of choice was HotDog for editing HTML. There were no Tumblrs or WordPress themes. You had to build everything from scratch. It was the new frontier.” HotDog provided users with shortcuts (and a built-in FTP client for uploading the finished site but creating a web page was still a dry, repetitive task. No wonder youngsters like Dino blew off steam in between <blink> tags by taking the piss out of cultural icons. Why not? It’s not like anybody was watching… Yet.
At this time, social sharing was confined to big lists of “cool links,” curated search engines like Yahoo!, and word of mouth on USENET. These limited channels managed to attract a lot of attention for Bert Is Evil. Some people were shocked. Others were confused, thinking the Children’s Television Workshop was involved. A lot of folks just wanted to help. Ignacio received unsolicited “evidence” from all over the world and even found a few regular collaborators.
“Many fans contributed to the site through the years. People started adding to the original collection I made with Wout Reinders and Jasper Hulshoff Pol. Many mirror sites popped up. The quality of many of the Bert images was substandard, but some were gems.”
But what about the people who worked on Sesame Street? They couldn’t be happy watching their character’s reputation get dragged through the cybermud. Mocking the most prominent children’s show in the country could have opened Ignacio up to lawsuits, criminal proceedings, or worse. Luckily for him, it turns out the Children’s Television Workshop is staffed by reasonable adults.
“They did get it,” Dino says. “I heard from some people from the Children’s Television Workshop in the early days. They had no problem with the site and found it funny.”
Bert Is Evil had chunks of the modern Internet’s DNA: Memes, Photoshops, and dark humor found on sites like 4chan and reddit are evolved versions of what Ignacio did with FractalCow. This was early crowdsourcing, but the big crowd hadn’t quite shown up yet.
It was an unusual site for its time. Most comedic websites hosted plaintext joke collections. They didn’t stray too far from the content you’d find wandering down the Humor aisle at Waldenbooks. Bert Is Evil was created for the web, and its success was due in no small part to how the web was growing around it.
A couple of years passed, and the web caught on. Every news outlet rushed to put out articles documenting our new cyber existence. Chat rooms, cybersex, and buying movie tickets from home were all popular topics, but most articles boiled down to the older generation mocking this “wacky Internet craze” they assumed would fade in a few years.
Smart people took the web seriously. In 1995, the Academy of Web Design and the website Cool Site of the Day collaborated to sponsor the first annual Webby Awards. In 1998, they recognized Bert Is Evil as the “Best Weird Website.” “It was a big deal. Back then, the Internet was such a new medium it still sought validation from TV and print. The Webby’s was a great way to put a real-world spotlight on what we were trying on the Internet.”
The award brought Ignacio’s humor to a whole new audience, including me. I was 15 years old, bored on summer break between freshman and sophomore year. Bert Is Evil contrasted the innocent with the abhorrent, and it lit my half-formed brain up with excitement. I was studying HTML at the time, so it seemed like a no-brainer for me to attempt a similar site. Inspired by. In the spirit of. A rip-off (if I’m being honest). I called it Domination: We Can Stop Brain Together. The site, centered on a harsh blue canvas, presented evidence that cultural phenomena like The Teletubbies were really devious plans by Brain (the genius-level mouse from the cartoon Animaniacs) himself! The site was covered in poor attempts at image composting. I even made a postage-stamp-sized video showing Baby Sun morphing into Steven Spielberg, complete with a watermark advertising the Morpher shareware I used to make it.
With the Webby win, thousands of new visitors flooded the site. Bandwidth wasn’t cheap, and Dino was only a young man without huge cash reserves on hand. He’d achieved his dreams for FractalCow. Fame. Recognition. Everything but a big paycheck to fund it all. In December 1998, he posted the following plea on the site:
“Over the past two years “Bert is Evil!” has been the highest hitting part of fractalcow.com. We have received tons of mail both negative and positive. We have been featured in other websites, radio shows, tv shows, and newspapers the world over. We received countless awards including the Webby Award for Weirdest site of 1998. The support from all of you has been tremendous, thank you. All this exposure has generated so many hits that we can no longer afford to keep the site up. Simplenet.net the server fractalcow.com is sitting on is now charging us $200 a month to keep the site up instead of $20. They say this is due to the fact that we are using their resources too much. “Bert is Evil!” alone generates an average of 8000 hits a day. Simplenet.net can no longer host “Bert is Evil!” at the low-cost plan we have maintained for close to 3 years. So fractalcow.com has to bid farewell to Bert. From now on “Bert is Evil!” will be sitting on mirror servers. Since we put up the site for adoption we have received over 60 mirror sites. Thank you so much for all the support. To the other people who have offered mirrors, I’ll put up your links later, we seem to have enough but feel free to list them on search engines as a registered “Bert is Evil!” mirror. Even if my hosting fees were for unlimited bandwidth, my host started charging me in the thousands because the site got classified as a high traffic domain. I had to close it down and offer the whole site to other people as a zip file they can use to start mirrors. Bert Is Evil effectively became a proto-meme.”
The site spread across the old wide web like a virus. Within weeks, there were dozens of mirrors, which Ignacio kept indexed on his version of the site for as long as it was feasible. The site morphed as it spread, some “mirrors” adding so much new content they became entirely new sites.
One mirror produced a Photoshopped image with Bert and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. No more salacious than the images of him with Hitler or Bill Clinton, but one that would motivate Ignacio to cut the knees out from under Bert forever.
No good thing can last forever. In 2001, Bert moved from filler fluff to hard news when a Reuters photojournalist captured a protest sign in Bangladesh featuring the image of bin Laden and Bert. The protester had printed if off with no awareness of the satirical Western context.
News outlets jumped on the story in 9/11’s wake. Bert wasn’t just evil. He was now involved in the mounting tensions in the Middle East! For realsies! The story made headlines on many high profile news sites such as CNN, the BBC, ABC News, and The New York Times. It doesn’t escape Ignacio that this was a sign of things to come for American media. “The Bert/Bin Laden incident was one of the first times something from the Internet was sensationalized by mainstream media. It was covered on everything from NPR to Fox News. It was very weird to be part of all that,” he says.
The folks at the Children’s Television Workshop decided they couldn’t be “in on the joke” any longer. In a prepared statement, they said “Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding. We’re outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. This is not at all humorous. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future.”
“After the Bin Laden incident they were very polite and asked me if I could take the site down,” Ignacio says. “I then asked all the mirrors to close down but as you probably know, nothing is ever removed from the Internet.”
On October 11th, 2001, Ignacio posted the following message on the site:
I have taken down the “Bert is Evil!” site from my server. I would like to thank Sesame Workshop for their patience and restraint all these years. I implore all fans and mirror site hosts of “Bert is Evil” to stop the spread of this site too. This is not selling out. I was not bullied. I am not being a pussy. I am doing this because I feel this has gotten too close to reality and I choose to be responsible enough to stop it right here. I hope my other projects will receive an ounce of the appreciation you all showed “Bert is Evil!”. (Source)
While the original site is still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Ignacio’s decision to allow mirrors back in 1998 ensured it would always exist in one form or another. Some enterprising individuals even created original content to differentiate themselves from the other mirrors. “BertisEvil.TV, one of the longest-running mirrors, has tried to make a buck and sell merchandise and claim that it is the official site,” Ignacio says. “I used to be bothered by this, but I’ve come to accept that I do not own Bert.”
You can’t sling jokes forever. The Webbys are still around, but they aren’t freewheeling, “Weirdest Site” award-giving hug-fest they used to be. Dino Ignacio is older now too. He’s settled into something like a stable “adult” life. After college, he went into the video game industry. He worked at Electronic Arts, ensuring the user interfaces in games like Dead Space and Dante’s Inferno were super slick. Now he works on Social VR at Facebook. He has a daughter, and they even watch Sesame Street together. “It’s still a great show,” he says. “They have adapted very well.”
You can see Bert Is Evil’s influence in other “mature” Sesame Street parodies. The musical Avenue Q was a big hit only a few years after Ignacio put up his farewell message. It featured parodies of all the familiar Sesame Street residents (and Gary Coleman), but gave them real-world issues like homelessness, mental illness, loneliness, and “Schadenfreude” (taking pleasure in other’s pain). Songs included hits like “The Internet Is for Porn,” “If You Were Gay,” and “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.
There’s also the lovable terrorist Gitmo (an Elmo parody) who appeared in segments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in the early 2010s. Stewart’s show always had a good relationship with Children’s Television Workshop, not surprising since they’re both based in New York City. Cookie Monster himself has even appeared in sketches.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Peter Jackson film Meet the Feebles, which made puppets obscene way back in 1989. His humor was a lot more extreme than Bert Is Evil. I feel a little queasy just thinking about it.
I asked Dino about modern web culture: memes, mash-ups, and social media. “I think it’s amazing,” he said. “I love how we have used the Internet as a means of collaborating on humor and subculture. I am a big fan of the insanity of 4chan and the hive mind of Reddit. I really love finding single-serving sites like the stuff on http://internetisuseful.com/.” It’s not surprising he’s a big fan of memes, 4chan, and the like. After all, he was one of the first people out there making them.
On his official website (http://dinoignacio.com/), he lists several interviews and articles about Bert Is Evil; evidence of the silly young man he used to be. Some people would want to bury jokes about Bert and Ernie performing deviant acts on each other as deep as… They’d want them to disappear. What would somebody not raised in the web’s embryonic cyber-slush think?
“It comes up now and then as people Google me. I used to avoid talking about it but I’ve learned to embrace it.”
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