Irony Is Dead. Long Live Irony (On The Web)

If irony really is dead, you might mark its toe tag May 10, 2000, launch date of Inside.com Years before co-founding that high-profile media-news website, editor Kurt Andersen co-founded the satiric Spy, a magazine that in the '80s and '90s treated the media and entertainment businesses as sardonically as Inside treats them earnestly. Writing about the new venture in New York magazine, media columnist Michael Wolff argued that you couldn't pull off a Spy online if you wanted to, for the Web is an "irony-resistant environment."

But is it really? Spy's rarefied, Manhattan-centric humor wouldn't be likely to find a mass audience online, but the cheap, egalitarian Web has long been a haven for wisenheimers: the cutting commentary of Suck www.suck.com) the deadpan fake-newspaper Onion www.theonion.com and the esoteric wit of McSweeney's www.mcsweeneys.net) More recently, old media have tried to get Blair Witch-y with sites like Time Warner's Entertaindom www.entertaindom.com) whose flashy but lame Hollywood spoofs prove the rule that online humor is funny in inverse proportion to its budget. And even in the Web's grownup days of corporate sites and e-commerce, a pair of scrappy newcomers is continuing the tradition of wicked pop-culture satire online.

The addictively mean Fametracker www.fametracker.com)--"The Farmer's Almanac of Celebrity Worth"--is dedicated to exposing the overexposed and meting out punishment for hubris. Its signature feature, the "Fame Audit," dissects superstars' careers and publicity binges with surgical detail. On Ben Affleck: "[He] has had a Counting Crows kind of career--too much, too fast, too soon. This isn't his fault, but it is his problem." Each audit tots the star's assets and liabilities (Affleck's: "Easygoing, cocksure charm"/"Consistently refers to his acting as 'the work'") and judges the celeb's "actual" and "deserved" level of fame (for Affleck, respectively: "Johnny Depp" and "Omar Epps"). The site's "2 Stars, 1 Slot" compares eerily similar niche actors (Vicki Lewis vs. Kathy Griffin in "Battle of the Redheaded Flibbertigibbets"), while the forthcoming "Media Hog" will be a celebrity fantasy league where readers "adopt" stars, who score points for hogging press coverage.

When Fametracker disses the famous, they stay dissed. Yet its nastiness is informed by a genuine love of show biz. "If we thought everything was crap," says editor Tara Ariano, "we wouldn't go see four movies a week." Fametracker simply wants justice: "Do you know," says Giancarlo Esposito's audit, "how many underappreciated, underrecognized and underutilized actors--like Giancarlo Esposito--could be made famous simply by stripping Whoopi Goldberg of her fame and dispensing it to the deserving?" Preach it!