I’ve noticed in the time since my first two Amazon review articles that the whole “fake funny Amazon review” thing has really become an established phenomenon, with its own in-jokes, cliches and traditions, which in a way makes me a little sad. I hate the “This was so much better before it went mainstream” attitude, and I’m glad more people are enjoying the occasional unexpected laugh in the course of their shopping experience, but the reality is that more participants lead to more repetition.

So you get a lot of generic jokes about the magical properties of an item. It’s funny and unexpected the first time, but after a few hundred variations of the same basic joke, you get critical and picky, and you feel more like you’re auditioning a bunch of writers to see who can write the best “magical HDMI cable” joke than like you’re stumbling across that silly idea and being genuinely tickled.

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“I can’t choose between the one who said it cured her cancer, the one who said it cured her AIDS and the one who said it cured her cancer and her AIDS.”

And I don’t know about anyone else, but slipping in a reference to the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt, or any other classic Amazon joke-review item, just ruins any humorous story-driven review for me. It’s like winking continuously at the camera during a Saturday Night Live skit. Sarcasm is a great performer, people, but he is sad and lonely without his partner, Deadpan.

That said, there’s still plenty of originality and creativity in the world of silly reviews — it just takes a little more digging to find it. Here’s a few examples:

#8. Officially Licensed Luke Skywalker Ceremonial Jacket With Medal of Yavin

Officially Licensed Luke Skywalker Ceremonial Jacket With Medal of Yavin

Now there are a lot of joke opportunities to be had in an Officially Licensed Luke Skywalker Ceremonial Jacket With Medal of Yavin. You really have to sit down and think about what direction you want to take. Do you want to make the predictable joke about how you put on the jacket and turned into Luke Skywalker or exhibited characteristics that Luke Skywalker exhibited in the movies? Half the reviewers did. I’m not even sure if I find that joke funny or not because seeing it repeated 15 times tends to bias you.

So that’s where I thought this one was going:

Fortunately not.

Another way to go is the “making fun of nerds with brutal sarcasm” route. You can aim for straight-up mean:

Or a more subtle character piece:

Or take the other side and tell those Star Wars bashers what’s what:

How is that different from the other “this jacket turns you into Luke” reviews, you might wonder. Well, context — it’s framed as a serious defense against the “Ha! NERDS!” reviews — and deadpan delivery. Maybe it’s just me, but a lot of the other stories give me the vibe that the writer was giggling while typing his own joke.

And finally, I had to laugh at this one because this is the last place I was expecting a Star Trek fan to sneak in a shot at Star Wars.

The only thing that bugs me is that I feel like Spock would be a better speller, but whatever, I’m already being way too picky about free reading material.

#7. MHP The Sandler All Wood Coffin Kit

The Sandler All Wood Coffin Kit

Yes, this is an actual pine coffin for sale. No, I don’t know why someone would buy a pine coffin off of Amazon. I thought the “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” section would help, but it just made things more confusing.

This indicates that either a lot of joke review connoisseurs were hitting this item on their way to other joke items or that someone is planning to kill his wife by gassing the house and protecting himself with a gas mask and then burying her in elf shoes. Perhaps he could never talk her into wearing elf shoes while she was alive, and this is the only way.

“That’s stupid,” you might say, because it is stupid. But this review seems to indicate that spouse-murdering has occurred to at least one purchaser:

So who’s stupid now? Probably still me. But this coffin appeals to not only to those who are about to be dead, but also those who are already dead. Now I’m just as tired as anyone else of throwaway zombie/vampire jokes where people think just mentioning zombies or vampires automatically makes something funny, but some of the zombie/vampire reviews here actually bring up good points about why a flimsy wooden coffin might be good or bad for different types of undead. Such as this one:

I don’t think they’ve settled the issue, but it does make you think, and it can be a good jumping-off point for a real discussion about the pros and cons of different coffins for different types of undead. I myself have been really guilty of lumping all the undead together when it comes to the coffin issue and never really thought about their unique needs.

This review in particular really opened my eyes:

I mean seriously, how would he get it down there? You don’t think about that sort of thing, right? These are the kinds of situations where you need feedback from real customers who are using your product out there in the field.

#6. Relaxman Relaxation Capsule

Relaxman Relaxation Capsule

The obvious joke here is about how it looks like a spaceship or other sci-fi device, and how it transports you to a virtual reality world or something. That concept could be funny and interesting in the right hands, but nobody here is exactly Philip K. Dick or anything, so those reviews didn’t really do it for me.

I am, however, always a sucker for a simple misunderstood-instructions joke:

And there’s nothing like good old-fashioned biting sarcasm about the usefulness of the product:

Probably one of the better short-story-form reviews is this one, slightly more grounded in reality than the average “transported to another dimension” yarn and probably the better for it.

Not only is it an interesting story, but it also brings up a common human dilemma that many of us face — whether the life of a human being is worth as much to us as their collection of Batman comics. And it doesn’t just apply to neighbors with Batman comics. It applies to anyone in our lives with a collection of Superman comics, or Marvel comics, or manga, or any type of graphic novel media.

#5. Ready America 77100 Cat Evacuation Kit

Ready America 77100 Cat Evacuation Kit

Your first thought might be, “Is this a joke product?” No, you (CENSORED). Some people, when faced with a fire or earthquake, might want to leave the house with their cat safely restrained and well-supplied instead of releasing it into the street to be run over by an arriving emergency vehicle. Maybe this product isn’t for you if you like to throw your cat into the path of approaching fire trucks, but some people can make use of it.

Sorry, I’m supposed to be presenting sarcastic reviews, not writing them. As you can guess, most of the jokes come from misunderstood instructions, although each of these reviewers decided to go a different direction.

Artist’s conception.

Taking a completely different route, another reviewer explores the alternate meaning of “evacuate”:

And finally, someone who may have ordered entirely the wrong product:

Dear Struggling Actors,

The market for fame is saturated. You can all go home. Sorry for getting your hopes up like that. The truth is, you have a better chance of being hit by a satellite than by fame. And just so we’re all on the same page, fame is exactly the point of all this. Any ambition to act for the sake of artistic satisfaction was run down and sucked into the wheel wells under the sports car of fame long ago, because fame makes more money and it’s just cooler.

“We just wanted to stop for a minute and say, ‘You’re welcome.’”

Now most of you probably don’t believe me, and that’s fine. You’ve heard that the odds of success are slim, but you’re different from all those other people, you have been singled out by providence for this. Parents, teachers and community theater directors have told you your entire life that you are gifted — that you are born to make emotions with your face under camera and stage lights, a face that was too optimistic or too young to devastate with brutal honesty. Well, I can’t see your faces, and I have some bad news.

Here are five good reasons your career path will make you absolutely miserable.

#5. You Aren’t Building a Real Skill Set

When your dream is to be an actor, you don’t have the luxury of simultaneously perusing a fallback dream. That’s why you’ll never see a struggling actor holding down a full-time job as a marine biologist. Acting is a jealous and needy career that doesn’t like the thought of you keeping your options open. You’ll need a job that allows you to leave at a moment’s notice for auditions, usually for two or three hours at a time. Or, assuming you are fortunate enough to be cast in anything, you need a job that allows you to miss work for a week at the very least. The logical solution is to work at night at a restaurant or bar. The trouble, however, is that most of these jobs were never intended to be careers. They have high turnover rates and offer little in terms of personal satisfaction.

And that will all seem fine at first — great, even — for building that romantic sense of humility you intend to wear once you’re famous. Taking orders from customers and folding napkin fans in wine glasses is just part of the struggle that you will remember fondly while masturbating poolside to your own biography.

“Ooh yeah. Keep toiling, right there.”

That is, until your friends outside of the entertainment industry start developing actual skill sets that lead to raises, promotions and the general advancement of their careers. Everyone who entered the work force along with you will gradually move into better jobs because they’ve built up experience and because that’s how nearly every other profession is designed to function. Meanwhile, there’s no guarantee that you will book a role, ever. All the experience you’ll be racking up will just be preparing you for a life in the service industry. Sure, you will still be honing your skills as an actor through classes and auditions, but until your acting resume includes more than school plays and student films, it won’t help you get a job, because …

#4. Most Roles Have Nothing to Do With Acting

Here is an innocuous commercial for Listerine:

There are three people featured for about four seconds apiece in that commercial. Each one of them is an actor who had to audition for that role. That may not sound like much, but take a minute to consider exactly what that entails:

All three of them, without a doubt, started with dreams of being respected actors. They likely struggled for weeks if not months to find an agent, and paid upwards of $500 to have headshots taken and printed. Then they drove to an audition in the middle of a workweek and waited in a waiting room for an hour with 20 to 30 other people who looked exactly like them before being wrangled into a small room four or five at a time to say their names and, finally, to swish. They stood there for a few seconds pretending to swish mouthwash around their mouths. That’s it. That’s 80 percent of all the auditions you will go to. Now consider the hundreds of people who also auditioned and didn’t get that part. All of that energy, time and money amounted to 10 seconds of moving their cheeks around for a casting director who had already seen scores of other eager young actors do the exact same thing.

“Yeah, I get it. You’re doing like a crazy thing. Really nice work, there.”

Those three actors weren’t hired for that commercial based on their acting ability or really anything that they could control. They were hired because they had a look that a Listerine ad sales department thought might sell more bottles, so the purpose of all those auditions was only to be sure that everyone actually looked like their headshots and that they were capable of ballooning their cheeks. But surely that’s just a commercial, right? Actors also audition for meaty roles in movies and television, acting must be the deciding factor there. Well actually, no.

#3. You Will Never Be Considered for Roles That Require Acting

Any struggling actors who have never had a significant role before are not members of the Screen Actors Guild. SAG was designed as a union to ensure that actors were paid fair wages for their work. Nearly every movie and television show has to operate within the guidelines of SAG, which means that they can only hire SAG actors or else they have to pay a hefty fine to cast someone outside the union. Naturally, studios will cast SAG members over nonmembers every time. So how do you become a member? Well, that’s where things get completely absurd.

The rules of SAG state, “Performers are eligible to join Screen Actors Guild after working on a SAG film in a principal role.” So just to clarify, no one will cast you unless you are already in the union, and you can’t get into the union until you are cast. A director has to like you so much that he or she is willing to trust you with a primary role despite the fact that you have no previous experience in film and be willing to pay a fine just to have you in that role. Now remember before when I mentioned that there are hundreds of other people who look exactly like you auditioning? At least 50 of them will already have their SAG cards.

“Good luck!”

That still leaves you with non-SAG or Ultra-Low Budget SAG productions. The only trouble there is …