The early web
Bert is Evil
1996
Bert is Evil was a joke website made in 1996 by Dino Ignacio, a 22-year-old web designer in the Philippines. With doctored photos and deadpan commentary, it presented “evidence” that Bert, the gentle Muppet from Sesame Street, was secretly a villain.
- Year
- 1996
- Made by
- Dino Ignacio, a web designer from the Philippines
- Where it started
- Dino Ignacio’s personal website
- What it was
- A website of doctored photos
- Also called
- Evil Bert
The story
Ignacio started it at his parents’ home near Manila as a joke about a character he had loved as a child. The site put Bert beside notorious figures from history, added mock interviews with other Muppets, and included a note admitting that its maker did not really think Bert was evil. It won a Webby Award in 1998, in the category for weird websites.
By the summer of 1998 the site cost too much to host, so instead of closing it Ignacio invited fans to put up copies. Dozens of mirror sites appeared and kept adding new evidence, including a fan-made picture of Bert beside Osama bin Laden that drew little notice for years.
In October 2001, weeks after the September 11 attacks, a print shop in Bangladesh made posters for a protest using pictures found online, and one still had the small Bert image in it. News photos of the rallies went around the world. Ignacio said he had nothing to do with the picture, and took his pages down on 11 October 2001.
Why it matters
It is an early case of a joke growing beyond its maker’s control once fans could copy and extend it, and of an internet joke turning up, unrecognised, in real news photos. The historian Roy Rosenzweig opened a 2003 essay on keeping digital history with it.
Where it is now
The site has been offline since October 2001 and survives only in web archives. It is remembered as one of the first photo-editing parodies, and for the posters of 2001.
Sources
- Bert is Evil (Wikipedia)
- Bert is Evil, Weird, 1998 (The Webby Awards)
- Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era (Roy Rosenzweig, 2003)
- Bert and Osama together on a placard (The Globe and Mail, 2001)
- Bert and the infidels (Reason, 2002)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.