Looking at yesterday’s Dow Jones chart probably didn’t make too many people happy, which is why I thought it might be nice to take a look at graphs and charts that WILL make you happy. A classic in this medium is the Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man chart. Ingeniously recursive. For some reason, music-related themes are particularly popular; GraphJam has so many submissions in this category that it’s hard to find the actually funny ones. No worries, there are plenty of collections elsewhere, like this collection of humorous musical graphs (which somehow managed to omit a couple of important ones like Jay-Z’s 99 Problems and Classification of Young American Females According to Brian Wilson). As you might guess, the tech industry is also partial to this kind of goofing off, so we have collections like A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look at Social Sites. And crappy graphs are such a familiar element of doing business that there’s even an online Crappy Graph Builder available to punch up your mind-numbingly dull PowerPoint presentation. No need to get all fancy and technical though, in the clip featured here, comedian Demetri Martin should have you laughing out loud with only an easel, a large sketchpad, and a some simple hand-drawn graphs. View video full size here if you prefer.

Some Bonus Charts:

Any working web developer can appreciate this one: