Memes on the Internet are pop culture sped up by several orders of magnitude. Like staph infections, memes mutate quickly, spawning offshoots and mashups and all manner of odd progeny. That makes it tough to keep them going and to make money off of them, since they come, change, and go so quickly. It’s even harder if the meme’s an accidental one — if, like the Star Wars Kid, you didn’t mean to become an Internet sensation.

That doesn’t stop people from trying, though.

Take Gary “Numa Numa” Brolsma. In 2004, he made a webcam video of himself dancing along to a Moldovian pop song called Dragostea din tei. “Numa Numa” became such a sensation that even the New York Times reported on it. Brolsma was so overwhelmed that he ended up turning down most interview requests.

I can understand why the video was so popular. The song is catchy and weird, and Gary’s enjoying the hell out of the song. There’s something appealing about seeing a guy have so much fun so unreservedly. He’s also got great timing here: the video starts out with him lip-synching, and suddenly there are wild flailing arms! And jazz hands!

These days Gary has a publicist. He has a website. And as his publicist told the ROFLCon people, who wanted him to come to their convention about Internet memes, “At this time Gary is in high demand and we can only consider events that pay him for his time,” and that some scholars “believe that Gary’s work was the most widely seen and embraced single piece of human generated content since the days of the Tower of Babel.”

Here’s how Brolsma tried to recapture the magic:

Leaving aside the infomercial video effects^*, what strikes me most about the New Numa video is how studied it is. What made “Numa Numa” work was Gary enjoying the song, and how his goofy choreography, like the Code Monkey Dance, fit the music. “New Numa” lacks that spark, and it doesn’t have the original’s timing and rising-and-falling action. It’s a pale echo of the original.

^*Though it’s nice to see other people have trouble pulling good keys from greenscreen footage.

Tay Zonday, singer of “Chocolate Rain”, went in a different direction. The original video has a synth-and-drum loop that burrows into your brain, a guy who looks like he’s 12 yet has a deep voice, enigmatic lyrics, and weird mannerisms.

It’s nice that Tay explained that he moves away from the mic to breathe in. The video was popular enough that Cadbury Schweppes asked him to make a video for the launch of Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper.

“Cherry Chocolate Rain” takes the song in an entirely new direction. It’s slick, overproduced, and over-the-top. There’s a weird nod to Apple’s “1984” ad. Tay smiles his way through a complete send-up of rap videos. And every time I hear him sing “Ohio’s agriculture’s based on grains” with a straight face I lose it.

“Cherry Chocolate Rain” works where “New Numa” doesn’t because it keeps the core of what made the original popular and ladles on a healthy serving of crazy. Rather than try to reproduce the original video, it mutates it, re-imagining it as a typical music video.

There are two things that help determine whether a creator can keep an Internet meme going: intentionality and mutability. Did the creator intend for the creation to be viewed by as many people as possible? And how easy is it for the meme to be changed and re-written?

Take the two examples above. Gary Brolsma made his video for some friends and posted it on Newgrounds on a lark. Its runaway success took him by surprise. Tay Zonday, however, was seeking an audience for his songs. He’d written several songs before Chocolate Rain and posted them on YouTube. When Brolsma tried to re-capture the spark of the original, he made a near-copy of it; Zonday’s re-done Chocolate Rain is a very different creation while keeping a link to the original.

Lolcats are an excellent example of how mutability can keep a meme going. Even in their canonical form — cats plus captions — lolcats can be used to make endless jokes. And that’s before you add in LOLTrek, LOLgeeks, LOL My Children, and countless others. Unlike All Your Bases or Impossible Is Nothing, lolcats are above all a form rather than a single joke.

Hey, now that I have a theory and some examples, I’m ready to write a dissertation on Internet memes.

Liza’s been sick the last several days, congested like Hartsfield-Jackson Airport at Christmastime. She can’t breathe, and when we put her in her crib, she chokes, coughs, and wakes up. The only way we’ve gotten her to sleep for extended periods of time is by sitting in the recliner in her room and letting her lie on us. Needless to say, it’s hard to get a lot of sleep when she’s writhing on you.

That’s where we’ve been over the weekend. Expect normal posting to resume when we’ve had more sleep.

A few days ago, Anil Dash talked about whether or not Internet memes would really impact broader pulp culture. Such a move from Internet to e.g. TV or movies have typically been in the form of passing nods in geek-oriented media, such as Andrew referring to Trogdor in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Veronica Mars saying “boom goes the dynamite” in one episode.

That may be changing. As an example, I give you an ad for Mike Huckabee.

He’s taken Chuck Norris’s endorsement and made a commercial about it that mixes Chuck Norris Facts with Huckabee’s actual views. This is notable because the ad is aimed at Iowa voters, not Family Guy fans, and it has the meme as the center of it.

How will the other candidates respond? Will Mitt Romney talk about his platform while performing synchronized moves on treadmills? Will McCain further his image as someone stuck in the early 2000s with an “All Your Base” joke? “Congress made you a national health care plan… but I eated it“?

[tags]internet memes, mike huckabee, presidential politics, chuck norris facts, mitt romney, john mccain, ron paul, chuck norris can divide by zero[/tags]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I read a fair number of comics thanks to my brother. He’s introduced me to a lot of great comics, like James Robinson’s fabulous Starman and (more recently) Bill Willingham’s Fables.

Not all of the comics I’ve read are good, sadly, though I won’t blame those on Andrew. In some cases the writing was bad. In others, the art was what was so terrible.

Enter Rob Liefeld. He’s known for a certain…unique style of comic book art. Do you like characters who wear pouches everywhere? Do you enjoy looking at men with outsized muscles and teeny tiny feet? What’s your opinion on women in comics being drawn with outrageously large breasts, waists that are three inches in diameter, and who stand as if their spine is broken?

That’s why this list of Rob Liefeld’s 40 worst drawings amused me so much. Be warned! It contains naughty swears and the like. What amuses me most about the list is that Liefeld was so prolific and his style so often terrible that the list can have forty images and yet miss out on my personal favorite, a rendition of Captain America where Cap could put his dinner plate on his pectorals and not have it slide off.

To make up for those links, here are some images from a recent comic-book-themed Simpsons episode featuring Alan Moore, Art Spiegleman and Dan Clowes. I didn’t see the episode, and that makes me sad, but that sadness is tempered by seeing the screencap of Millhouse holding “Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation”.

This photo totally cracks me up. What are they looking at?

Click through for more wacky shots of our time at the beach.

We here at the Granade Casa enjoy our TV watching. We used to watch a fair bit but since the coming of the next generation we’ve turned down the tap a wee bit. I’m lucky if I can make it through an entire episode of something without falling asleep on the couch after Eli and Liza are in bed.

So the writers’ strike has come up in discussion here at the house. We support folks getting paid for what they write, by the way. I think it’s totally crazy that it even has to be spelled out in that way. If someone were building a house or a car or something concrete there would be no question as to whether or not they need to get paid at the end of their labor.

But writing? Pfff. That’s not WORK. So when I read this article by Joss Whedon I felt like marching over to our local TV affiliates and picketing as well.

I’ve tried to write another paragraph here but everything I write is silly. Just read Joss’s response to the NYT article and hear me shouting, “Preach it, Brother!” from the choir.

And just because it’s so darn funny, here’s what Ask a Ninja has to say about the strike as well:

If you don’t subscribe to our comment feed, you’ve probably missed the saga involving my comparison of a Guitar Hero controller to a Kidz Beatz toy guitar from last year. The picture that accompanied the post shows up a lot on Google Image searches, so we’ve gotten a trickle of commentators who take me far too seriously. As my replies get more and more over the top, I keep expecting people to figure out that I’m joking, but so far that hasn’t happened.

I’ll point out that Rock Band has just come out, and that I’m likely to be just as much a hater of Rock Band as I am of Guitar Hero. If anyone wishes to buy me the entire Rock Band kit to try to convince me otherwise, be my guest.

It’s clear that, whatever other benefits you gain from being able to read minds, you also become thick as a giant slab of concrete. If Sherlock Holmes had been able to read minds, he might have solved some of his cases faster, but he’d also have been more like Inspector Clouseau.

For proof, I only need point at Heroes. Matt Parkman can read minds, but he can’t seem to do anything useful with that information. And then we have last night’s episode. Continue reading Mind Reading Makes You Stupid →

We’re back from a Thanksgiving trip to see my family and spend time at the beach and watch Eli run into the surf, then back out, then back in, then back out again. We’ll have pictures and whatnot up eventually.

In the meantime, life is overwhelming, in that “hey, weren’t you gone for a while?” kind of way. To tide you over until intelligent posting resumes, a thesis: lolcats are merely the latest example of how people on the internet recontextualize anything and everything. For a very early example of this phenomenon, see the Dysfunctional Family Circus.

Happy Thanksgiving, all of our US friends and readers and whatnot. And if you’re not in the US, a happy Thanksgiving to you anyway. The college semester that I spent studying in the UK, when Thanksgiving came around, our friends took me and my three other compatriots out to that most traditional of US Thanksgiving restaurants, Pizza Hut. So there’s something you can do to celebrate.

Though I’m not sure I’d recommend the tuna pizza.