A user on eBaum's World, a site which posts pictures and invites often profane discussion, suggested his peers search on a string of icons — "✈ ▌▌" — and thereby launch it onto Google Trends, the search engine's tracker for swiftly rising Internet phenomena.

The trick worked; Google's algorithm declared the glyph's rise "volcanic." And despite a surge of protests about its tastelessness, the Googlers have yet to censor the term, as they've been known to do with other offensive searches which show up on Google Trends, like a swastika symbol which showed up last summer.

Officially, Google says it has robots which take care of this: "The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material." In reality? The 9/11 hack shows how easy it is to fool Google.

Unlikely, save for one determined Atlanta fan with a taste for hip-hop cartoons. Superdeluxe's staff was laid off in May, but it took the Time Warner subsidiary seven months to move a small portion of its video library over to AdultSwim.com and shut the site down.

Turner isn't the only one finding it hard to get a laugh. Funny Or Die, which has never matched the popularity of "The Landlord," the bossy-baby clip from Will Ferrell, has morphed into a collection of cooking videos and videogame walkthroughs. Heavy.com is in management disarray, and is trying to make money on its advertising network rather than funny videos. eBaum's World, bought by the older brother of Google founder Larry Page, is entwined in a baroque financial disaster. And JibJab, famed for its political-satire musical numbers, seems to make more of its money through serving as an advertising agency for the likes of OfficeMax and Honda.

Why the serial failures? One could point to the struggling market for online advertising, or sponsors' unease with the racier fare preferred by the young male demographic they're hoping to reach.

But I think it has more to do with the nature of humor. Telling someone that they're about to hear a really funny joke just raises expectations. A website dedicated to laffs will find its viewers inevitably drifting away as the gags go flat. Sad as it is to say, people go to YouTube prepared to be bored — and then they're delighted to find something mildly amusing, becauses it's so unexpected. There's no business to be built around such idle surfing — but it's the very nature of how people get their laughs.

A decade ago, Carl looked like the more successful brother, having sold eGroups, a company he cofounded, to Yahoo for $432 million. But Carl's efforts to repeat his success, and come anywhere close to Larry's, have made him a buffoon. Zvue shut down its San Francisco Web operations in July, leaving its collection of funny-if-you're-15-years-old websites to Eric Bauman, the creator of eBaum's World. Bauman is also owed millions by Zvue, for fare like "Ass Cream Vendor."

HandHeld is borrowing $24 million, largely to finance the eBaum's deal. That leaves it with $9 million — not enough to pay eBaum's the extra $15 million it's owed under the earnout deal. That means that eBaum's $67.5 million isn't just conditional on its traffic — it's conditional on HandHeld's ability to raise money.

No matter. The takeaway from this deal is that buyers, for a host of reasons, are paying for performance when buying interactive properties. Either they're shelling out modest amounts, as Discovery did for the TreeHugger green blog, or they're placing conditions even on the most promising acquisitions, as Disney did in holding back half of its $700 million payout for Club Penguin. That's a clear sign, that despite the blog-business hype, it's still a buyer's market.