LOL
Do you remember the days before the Internet got so angry? Me, too.
I
n honesty, of course, there were “flame wars” early on, and before the Internet was really a “thing,” when people chatted on bulletin boards and would get into angry discussions – though granted, most of them were about coding and geeky stuff.
But early on, the Internet could be fun and funny, and people spent embarrassing amounts of time sharing videos and jokes and silly things – some of them funny only because they were so idiotic.
Take “I can haz cheezeburger.” A website featuring video and images, it was created in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, cats (and other animals) were shown with silly expressions, the iconic image being a cat looking very pleadingly and saying, “I can haz cheezburger?” The website got about 1.5 million (yes, million) hits per day at its peak in 2007.
The Cheezburger cats were actually preceded by LOLcats, cats speaking in “catspeak” and featuring cats with strange expressions saying silly things. LOL, of course, was “laugh out loud,” except in the case of one friend who thought it meant “lots of love,” and almost sent it to a friend as a gesture of sympathy before he was corrected.
In 2005, Charlie the Unicorn was one of my favorites, which I never tired of watching, as he was invited to Candy Mountain by two friends with peculiar voices. The “animation” was rendered in a very primitive and funny fashion, and it was forwarded around offices, always leaving its trail because the latest person to get it was LOLing conspicuously. 
About this same time there was a series of, er, infomercials, featuring Tom Dickson, founder of the Blendtec line of blenders. In each one, he asked, and answered the immortal question, “Will it blend?” and proceeded to throw any number of things into his blender, from a half a cooked chicken, bones and all, to a frightening concoction of salsa, tortilla chips, Buffalo wings and some beer, to the worst of all: an iPhone.
JibJab was (and is) a clever little app that inserted your face on a cartoon, allowing you (or a friend you wanted to tease and/or humiliate) to sing a song, dance, send an animated greeting card, or any number of other silly things. It was founded in 1999 by Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, and hit its early home run with George Bush and John Kerry singing “This Land is Your Land” in 2004, when they were presidential candidate rivals.
The app, ReFace, has gone them one better, and takes video clips from famous movies or other highly identifiable video, and doesn’t replace the star’s face so much as blend the star’s face with yours – so you can say, “I’ll be bahk,” or become Jim Morrison, or The Penguin – to hilarious results.
Around Christmas time, a clever marketer for UK department store, John Lewis, created ads that were so full of the holiday spirit that they became eagerly anticipated – and now other franchises are trying to do the same. (Irn Bru, a Scottish drink, has done one of the best with its flying snowman who “nicks” a child’s Irn Bru…)
Then there were the “challenges.” It was initially kind of a cute idea, in which a “challenge” was issued, and people recorded themselves accomplishing whatever the task was – eat a spoonful of cinnamon without any liquid, drop a bucket of ice water over your head, and which quickly hit its nadir with the “Tide Pod Challenge,” which encouraged silly young people to eat, yes, consume, a Tide detergent pod.
1998’s Hamster Dance showed just how funny something very simple can be – just a page full of cartoon hamsters dancing. Really.
Cats and cucumber videos; Parkour videos; dog shaming posts; and of course the infamous Darwin Awards, which have reached new heights thanks to our phones being able to record people doing really, really, really silly and/or dangerous things.
And not only are these just a few (happy) memories, but there’s something new and amusing that starts up every day. Look for the fun – it lowers your blood pressure!
