Within the last year, a new genre of site has emerged on the internet: the neo-absurdist meme that spreads because it’s either uproariously funny or extremely disturbing, depending on the degree of fictionalization.

The classic case (and one of my perennial favorites) is BonsaiKitten.com, a site “dedicated to preserving the long lost art of body modification in housepets,” and purporting to sell cats stuffed into glass jars. Further exploration makes clear the site is a hoax, but many animal rights activists weren’t amused. Apparently similarly humor-impaired, the FBI launched a full-scale investigation of the site, including serving MIT (the site’s original host) with a grand jury subpoena, before realizing that they were chasing nothing more than a rather clever student prank.

Since then, a slew of similarly ambiguously-fictional sites have followed suit, settling at various locations on the fringes of acceptability and political correctness: an earnest and well produced site about one man’s passion for sex with cars, a corporate advertisement for tools allowing Mexican farm-laborers to telecommute without crossing the border, and everything in between.

Yet all that might still leave the world unprepared for FetaPets.com. A FetaPet, the site explains, “is a pet you will love forever,” provided, it seems, that you’re prepared to love a dog fetus wearing a collar and floating in a jar. Still, the site is uproariously, if not disturbingly, funny (the fan mail especially so), and unlike the easily-debunked Bonsai Kitten, debate is now raging around the Internet about its veracity.

Brecht and Kaufman would be proud.

Special note for those few readers who have not by now back-buttoned in disgust, never again to return, and especially for those who, while viewing FetaPets.com, laughed hard enough to lose bladder control: Tune in tomorrow for a fetal anecdote even funnier than FetaPets.com itself, courtesy of one of my colleagues: the story of Irving the Unnerving.