There is a specific man who is impossible to buy for. He owns everything he wants. He buys anything he needs within four minutes of thinking of it. And every year he says "honestly, do not get me anything" in a tone suggesting he means it.
He does not mean it. Nobody has ever meant it. What he wants is something he would never buy for himself and would be quietly thrilled to own, and that is the entire job description of a gag gift.
The Man Who Says Do Not Get Me Anything Is Lying
A good gag gift beats a sensible one on three counts, and it is not close.
- It gets opened in front of people. A sensible present gets a nod and a thank you. A gag gift gets the whole room, and for about ninety seconds he is the most interesting man at the table.
- It keeps working. Socks are worn once and mourned quietly. A prank object sits on a desk for two years being funny to every new person who walks past it.
- It proves you know him. Anybody can buy a gift card. A gift card says "I remembered on the way here". A well chosen joke says "I have thought about you specifically, and this is what I came up with", which is either touching or worrying depending on the item.
The only way to fail is buying something crude with no craft in it. Rude is not automatically funny. Everything below is actually funny.
Desk Gifts: Maximum Exposure, Minimum Risk
Desk gifts are the best value in gifting because they get seen every single day by everybody who walks past. You buy once, the joke runs for years, and you are not there for any of it.
The best thing we sell is the Best Farter Ever Mug. It reads World's Greatest Farter, crossed out in red pen, corrected underneath to Father. It is rude and genuinely sweet at the same time, which is an extremely difficult trick, and it means the mug survives being shown to a grandmother. He will use it daily while insisting he only uses it because it is the big one.
For a colleague rather than a relative, the Prank Gift Box is a small matte black hinged box that looks unmistakably like jewellery right up until the moment it stops looking like jewellery. What springs out on a coil is a small gold hand making one very specific gesture. The gap between the packaging and the payload is the entire joke and it is beautifully engineered.
The Middle Finger LED Keychain is the pocket edition of the same idea, and Tiny Hands is a pair of very small hands on sticks with no function whatsoever, which somehow makes it the item people cannot leave alone.
Golf Gifts: A Sport That Takes Itself Extremely Seriously
Golfers are the easiest people on earth to buy for, because golf is a sport where the equipment is treated with total reverence and therefore any breach of that reverence is automatically funny.
The Funny Golf Balls look like ordinary balls until somebody reads one on the tee in front of three other men who are trying to concentrate. The Funny Golf Tees come with a carry case, and we will never stop admiring a joke that ships with its own luggage.
The smartest of the three is the Middle Finger Golf Ball Marker, because it is a magnetic hat clip. It lives on his cap. Permanently. Every round. Forever. You have installed something.
And then there is Toilet Golf, a complete putting green, putter, ball and flag designed for use in a bathroom. It is the loudest thing on this page and it gets photographed at every single party it appears at.
Bathroom Gifts: He Cannot Escape The Room
Bathroom gifts have an unfair structural advantage. He uses the room daily and there is no way out of your joke.
The Funny Toilet Paper Roll is the subtle play, printed and entirely usable. The Poop Plush Pillow is for the man whose house is a bit too tidy and who needs exactly one object in it that irritates him slightly every day.
The two survival kits are the strongest gifts we stock for a certain kind of man. The Fart Survival Set arrives as a proper tin with wipes, tissues and a printed protocol card, styled like genuine military issue kit, and it is presented with such a straight face that it takes people a second to catch up. The Emergency Survival Set pushes further and includes spare underwear and a hazmat bag. Both end up in a glovebox for a decade and get mentioned to strangers.
Panic Buys That Have Never Once Failed
For when you do not know the person well, or you have left it dangerously late and are currently reading this in a car park.
- The Magic 8 Ball works on every age in the room and has resolved more office arguments than any manager ever hired to do it.
- The Rude Birthday Card costs almost nothing and gets read out loud, which is more than most presents achieve.
- The Huge Fart Loading Tee gets worn to barbecues deliberately, which is the highest compliment a novelty shirt can receive.
- The Rubber Poop Slingshot is a multipack, making it the correct answer when you have to buy for several people and have run out of both time and ideas.
White Elephant: How To Get Your Gift Stolen Four Times
Secret santa and white elephant have their own rules, and most people lose by buying something merely bad. Bad is not the goal. The goal is a gift people will physically fight over.
What actually gets stolen has a pattern. It is visual, it reads across a crowded room in under a second, and it needs no explanation. Toilet Golf and the Prank Gift Box are our two most reliable steals, and both are small enough to carry home on a train, which matters far more than anybody admits at the time.
What loses is anything requiring a story. If you have to explain your gift, the room has already moved on and somebody else is opening a bottle of gin.
Match The Gift To The Man
A sorting method that has never let us down.
- Dads and fathers in law: the mug. Every time. Rude and affectionate is the only register that clears three generations at one table.
- Colleagues and bosses: desk objects only. Nothing with a smell, nothing that needs privacy, nothing you would regret appearing in a screenshot.
- Brothers and old friends: the survival kits, or anything from the prank shelf. That relationship can absorb it and has absorbed worse.
- Golfers: the ball marker if you want it used weekly, Toilet Golf if you want the reaction on the day.
- The man who genuinely has everything: Tiny Hands. There is no version of this where he already owns a pair.
If You Have Stopped Reading, Buy These Three
The Best Farter Ever Mug for family. The Prank Gift Box for the office. Toilet Golf for the party. Those three have never once let anybody down.
Dr. Gasman has been solving the impossible man problem since 1999. Browse the full FartMart range and get it sorted before he says it again.
