Modern Humorist
defunct online humor magazine

Modern Humorist was a United States–based humor webzine founded in 2000 by John Aboud and Michael Colton (who later became panelists on VH1's Best Week Ever), and managed by CEO Kate Barker. Its board of directors included feature film producer Frank Marshall and comedian Jon Stewart.
A competitor of The Onion, Modern Humorist stopped publishing new material in 2003. The site's archives remain online and free to the public. It was nominated for a Webby Award in the Humor category in 2001 and in 2004, losing to The Onion both times.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Modern Humorist” as defunct online humor magazine. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as defunct online humor magazine. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6888711. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2003, 2001 and 2004.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Modern Humorist” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.