Ancient Web: Spork.org Took a 1996 Utensil Joke Extremely Seriously

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

In 1996, one web author decided the plastic spork deserved a fan club, a manifesto, a merchandise line, and a physics experiment. Thirty years later, the joke is still on the web.

Visit the Slightly Less Than Official Spork Homepage.

The page's last-update date is September 10, 1996. It introduces the spork as a supposed triumph of confused design: too shallow for proper soup, too short-pronged for serious fork duties. The mock-serious verdict is that it fails at both things it tries to do, which somehow makes it a metaphor for humanity.

The site offers T-shirts for seven dollars, extra-large only. It cites the term's trademark history, collects references to sporks in television, and lists regional specimens. The New York public-school spork is praised for its launch potential; a Taco Bell example is criticized for breaking under pressure.

A foon is not merely an inverted spork

Much of the page is devoted to 'fooning,' the process of flexing a suitable plastic spork until the spoon bowl inverts. This, the author explains, creates a 'foon,' which can spring off a tabletop or produce a cracking noise called a 'spack.'

There are numbered instructions and descriptions of imaginary competitions. A linked 790-kilobyte AVI reportedly demonstrates trying to eat ramen with a spork; another, 1.3-megabyte clip shows a friend creating a foon. These are web-era video file links, not proof that the movies will play correctly in a modern browser.

The page also preserves contributions from readers: opinions on where to obtain the best cutlery, stories of school lunchrooms, and entirely unnecessary spork-based games. Individual names and 1990s email addresses appear beside the submissions. A list of related sites includes a Usenet group called alt.utensils.spork and references to old personal pages competing for spork-related fame.

That final detail is one of the best parts. This tiny subject had a network of arguments, rivals, and correspondents before social networks made niche communities automatically discoverable.

Spork.org is not a major invention archive or an established scientific study of cafeteria engineering. It is something rarer: a complete specimen of a 1990s joke site whose author committed so thoroughly to an absurd premise that it became an organized, collaborative reference.

Read the original Spork Homepage and its instructions for fooning.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.