Planet Sillicon

Internet Phenomena

By blog on Jul. 29, 2009.

Because I’ve recently learned about them, I figured I would share some particularly funny Internet Phenomena, or Memes. They really are very funny.

Not the funny that sucks you in right away, no, this is the kind of funny that the more you watch it, the funnier it gets. Take Badger, Badger, Badger, for instance, when you first hear it, it’s actually kind of annoying. But the longer it goes on (to a point!) the funnier it gets. I think that is one of the true hallmarks of an Internet Meme.

I really find this sort of thing fascinating. What will become one of these World Wide Web phenomena and what wont. It reminds me of many of the catch-phrases from Seinfeld. All the ones that took off, ‘Master of your domain’, (said in a hissing manner with a fisht pump) ‘Newman’ and ‘Yada, yada, yada’, were all unintentional hits. But the one time one of the writers thought this catch-phrase thing would happen, ‘Anti-Dentite’ it didn’t in the slightest. I wonder if the same is true of Net Memes?

A lot of the time you have to look up the joke to see why its funny. For years now I have been seeing pictures of cats captioned with ‘I believe you have my stapler’ and didn’t know what the reference was. Apparently, I just looked this up, it is a reference for a film called Office Space, and this just happened to be a one-liner that took off from it. Often these cat pictures are quite cute and funny, so I had wondered about this one.

Another stand out for me is Tunak Tunak Tun; the song is really catchy and the dancing really is hilarious. The guy seems to be having a lot of fun dancing all by himself, you’ve got to love that. The video is here, in case you’re interested, though I warn you, its a catchy song!

My favourite of all the Net Memes, though, is Chuck Norris Facts. See how I capitalised the ‘F’ in ‘Facts’ there? That’s because that what they are… Facts. Okay I don’t believe any of that, it’s just fun to play along. These things are fun in there absurdity.

As a side note, should you receive any of those odd emails that seem fishy, often these are what later become Internet Memes, but if you want to know sooner rather than later, check out Snopes, they investigate that sort of thing.