Dear Reader,

Midway through the decade-we-still-don't-have-a-name-for, people thought 'webcomics' were all strips focused on video games, influenced mainly by anime and pixel art. Yet one of the most popular webcomics didn't fit that description at all, and most of my comics friends seemed to have barely heard of it. It was beloved not by comic nerds, but by real, normal people sharing comics on their eye-wateringly ugly MySpace pages. And they shared them because they were funny.

Good jokes, told well, are why Cyanide & Happiness is so popular. For a comic that packs in an awful lot of blood, stick figure nudity, abortions and sheer contrariness, it is – at its heart – funny. The best of their strips aren't simply the ones that are the most outrageous, they're the ones that most perfectly subvert your expectations, which is what a joke should do. Sometimes that means giving you an unexpected ending to the "sitting in a tree" childhood rhyme, and sometimes it means giving you polio. But whatever the content, there's always a joke at the end.

Rob, Dave, Matt, and Kris are great guys, and their dedication to humor is complete. I've frankly got no idea what's in this book you're holding – they could've copy-and-pasted my foreword into anything – but I can confidently say that it will make you laugh. Or, failing that, it will at least distract you long enough for the guys to fuck your mom."