According to the way people read the Mayan calendar, the world will end on Dec. 12, 2012. In some ways, that's a bit of a relief, because I really am worried about what state Internet jokes will be in by then.
Internet jokes are like a horror-movie blob — always growing, engulfing everything in their path, their hunger becoming more and more ravenous. Where once a cow or a piece of bad translation concerning the proper ownership of bases could sustain it for a few weeks, now a joke appears on the Internet only to die from exhaustion moments later. It spreads like a plague now, everyone telling each other about it and quoting it like someone was handing out free iPhones to who can mention RickRolls the most in a three minutes.
This summer, I actually heard one of my coworkers ask, "What's a LOLcat?" I was so dumbfounded that he had not heard about them so much to the point where he wanted to bash in the brains of the next person who said, "I can has cookie," that I could not even form a cogent sentence to answer his question.
What is even worse is when someone, convinced that something beautiful and simple on the Internet is not good enough, decides that he must make it better. For this, you must be familiar with a video along the lines of "Yatta" or "Moskau." Both of these are videos of foreign bands performing a ridiculous "song and dance" number, the main joke being "Man, people from outside the United States can sure be silly!"
These videos in and of themselves were good fun, an easy way to kill a few minutes when you should have been studying or writing a paper. However, someone in Internet land decided that these were not good enough. Instead of just letting them be, this genius took it upon himself to write out what the closest-sounding English words would be to the lyrics of the song and then make a flash animation to give a corporal counterpart to every word of this newfound, stream-of-consciousness poem.
Is this more amusing than the original? No. Is it even anywhere near the level of absurdity and fun of the original? No. As with, Gus Van Sant's remake of "Psycho" (1998), one must wonder during every poorly drawn flame of this animation, "Why did I not just go back to the first video instead of wasting my time on this?" And the answer to that is, "Because it is new and will keep your attention for another 4 minutes as the Internet desperately tries to find something new for you that has not already been beaten to death."
And then, of course, there's Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video. In the three-and-a-half minutes of the song, the band creates a haunted house, populated by none other than the ghosts of Internet has-beens of the past five years. While this might have been something brilliant, meta and post-modern if done right (yeah, and perhaps Hollywood will actually start believing in "Ars Gratia Artis" as well…), it ended up just being another excuse for all of these "15 IMs of fame" folks to just do their exact same schtick over again. Except this time they had the support of a real pop band and now, just in case we had missed them the first time, Weezer was going to make sure that if we saw this video, all 20-or-so of these characters would be shoved down our throats.
Naturally, "Pork and Beans" became a YouTube sensation. Having run all of our Internet and humor resources dry, Youtube had no choice for content but to turn on itself.
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Devin Toohey is a senior majoring in classics. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
