This chapter considers the adoption of cartoon mascots by US right-wing groups. This seems to be a phenomenon limited to the US context (McSwiney et al., 2021), although there has been some diffusion of this imagery beyond the United States. For example, Pepe the Frog is a character from the comic Boy's Club (2005) by Matt Furie (who has decried the appropriation of his character and even proclaimed him dead, as we will see). While originally there was no connection with right-wing ideas, in 2015, a number of memes associating the alt-right and Pepe were published on 4chan and in October, Donald Trump posted a cartoon of himself as Pepe. Kek is the deity of another satirical religion (The Cult of Kek) associated with the right. Pepe is considered an avatar of Kek.

Originally, right-wing propaganda took the form of “dog whistles” (Bhat & Klein, 2020) that is, references known to the initiated but that maintain a degree of deniability or simply appear nonsensical to the uninitiated. For example, the number 1488 is a white suprematist dog whistle: it consists of the number 14, which stands for “14 words” which is itself a short hand for the slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The number 88 stands for Heil Hitler, since H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. Thus white suprematist merchandise is often priced at $14.88. (https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1488)

With the mainstreaming of Nazi imagery, the motivation for dog whistles seems to have diminished or possibly the amount of openly pro-Nazi, anti-semitic, pro-klan, etc., has increased along with dog whistles.

More recently, the alt-right has switched to using memes to recruit and spread their propaganda. According to Trillò and Shifman (2021, p. 2485), “Memes perform a number of key functions for the far-right, including channeling a dispersed user-base towards far-right movements and fostering in-group belonging among constituents.” They also point out that “the far-right's ability to accrue such a following depends on their ability to tap into the audience of commercial social media platforms.” (Trillò and Shifman, 2021, p. 2485)

Not only is alt-right propaganda and recruitment active on all social media, but the alt .rig ht has found alternative spaces in which to express its ideology and recruit.

The Internet (Web 1.0)

This is not a historical study, but it is important to start by noting that our world has changed significantly in an astonishingly short time span. Thirty years ago, this book would have been inconceivable simply because none of its subject matter existed. It is easy to forget that the changes we will consider all happened in under 30 years, and often much less.

The Internet was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Geneva, Switzerland. What Berners-Lee came up with was a transfer protocol (set of instructions) called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) which was itself based on the older FTP (File Transfer Protocol) dating back to 1971. Berners-Lee also wrote the first browser, called WWW (World Wide Web [1990]) which allowed people to interact easily with files. Part of the development of HTTP and WWW involved laying the foundations of HTML, the code that tells browsers what to display on screen. WWW was followed by Mosaic (1993), Netscape (1994) and Internet Explorer (1995). Later, Netscape launched Mozilla (1998) as open source.

While originally meant as a decentralized network for military operations and after its adoption by academe as a way to transfer files and information about research, almost immediately the internet started being used as a way to socialize, much along the line of the first 1980s Bulletin board systems (BBSs: Fidonet, The WELL, etc.). BBSs were essentially a precursor of the internet, with the difference that they worked over phone lines and had a dial-up model (where a user would connect to the BBS, get their email or download news and log off to read them offline). Importantly the idea was to use a local BBS so that one would not have to make a long distance call, which at the time were much more expensive than local calls.

Usenet: The Big Eight and the alt. Hierarchy

BBSs “evolved” into usenet, which was decentralized; in other words, there was no need to call a central BBS. News, posts and discussions could be accessed from any computer on the network. Usenet was organized in a hierarchy of newsgroups (discussion boards) where users could post. For example the rec groups (rec stands for recreation) include rec.music, rec.film and others.

According to Zimmer (2014) and McCool (2015) the term “spoiler” started out in the 1970s. McCool reports that in 1971 Doug Kenney, one of the founders of the National Lampoon, had a feature called “Spoilers” in which he revealed the ending of such films as The Godfather, Citizen Kane and Psycho. McCool also reports the use of “spoiler warning” in a column in the sci-fi magazine Destinies. As for the actual term “spoiler alert,” both sources agree that it first occurred in 1982, in a Usenet post (on Usenet, see Chapter 1), apparently in the context of a discussion of The Wrath of Kahn (a Star Trek movie).

A “spoiler alert” is essentially a courtesy warning to the reader/viewer/hearer that one is about to reveal something about a show, book, game, etc., that is a significant plot point (for example, who wins the game). Thus if one wants to avoid having the plot spoiled, one should stop reading/watching, etc. The interest in spoiler alerts comes from the fact this is very much a contemporary phenomenon and that jokes and memes have been using the term. If one searches for “spoiler alert” on the internet, one will find that numerous articles have the phrase “spoiler alert” in the title as a clever way of conveying the point of the article. For example, the title of Viega and Thompson (2012) is “Ten Years On, How Are We Doing? (Spoiler Alert: We Have No Clue)”. I will provide an extended example by analyzing a short 2015 comedy video by Key and Peele titled “Spoiler alert” which makes fun of the topic.

As we can see from the Google n-gram, in Figure 9.1, the earliest mention of the term begins in the 1990s, but the term does not really “take off” until the 2000s. So we can safely say that the spoiler alert is a practice (I hesitate to call it a genre) that is truly exclusive to the digital world. Now it is obvious that “spoilers” have always existed, at least potentially. It is easy to image someone saying, “Dante makes it out of hell and into heaven” to a reader in AD 1321 or a reader saying, “Aeneas makes it to Rome” to a would-be reader of the Aeneid in 18BC.

The reaction video is another genre unique to digital humor. According to Wikipedia, reaction videos go back to the 1970s in Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_video). The basic idea is that one shows a video of someone reacting to something, usually another video. There is a general consensus that one of the first set of viral reaction videos were the reactions to the infamous “2 girls 1 cup” pornographic video (which features coprofagia—the eating of excrement—and worse; Bliss, 2022). This is in line with the old observation that whenever there is a technological advance in the field of communication, pornography is among the first uses. Bliss (2022) maintains that a lot of reaction videos still revolve around pornography. In this sort of reaction video, the amusement or pleasure we draw is from watching the disgust of the viewers or their amusement, embarrassment or other emotional reaction, alone. In particular, Warren-Crow (2016) focuses on screaming “like a girl.” Indeed, according to Anderson (2011), the point of this sort of reaction video is that it allows the experience of a vicarious thrill without having to actually experience watching coprofagia, for example.

There are other, different kinds of reaction videos. In the genre that concerns us here, the screen is divided into two parts, either side by side, or one above the other, or in some cases the reaction is an inset video. The significant fact is that there are two different videos, and there is a contrast (incongruity) between the two videos. For ease of reference we will refer to the video that is being reacted to as the “target video.”

This is different from another genre of reaction video, in which a video which is not necessarily shown to the viewers is played for an audience in the video and the reactions are the subject of the video. There is debate as to what the first reaction video was. Warren-Crow (2016) claims that the first reaction video was “Nintendo Sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOUR” a video of a young boy and his sister who get very excited unpacking their Christmas present (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlcqWQVVuU). The video dates back to 2006 and is an unboxing video.

Consider the following jokes. The first is by Sarah Silverman

The second involves Tig Notaro and Natasha Leggero. A little background is necessary: in 2013, Leggero hosted a self-produced show on YouTube called “Tubbing with Tash” in which she “interviewed” comedians in her hot tub. In the following video

https://youtu.be/8YNtDkgxNG0

This may seem like an innocuous, if somewhat odd, exchange (why would Notaro wear a suit in a hot tub?). However, the video was posted October 30, 2013. Notaro had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012 and had had a double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery.

I think that it is unnecessary to explain why considering rape “bittersweet” and asking a cancer survivor who has undergone a double mastectomy to wear a bikini in order to get more hits on YouTube is cringeworthy. These two examples have the advantage of being very short, but we will also examine part of an episode of the American version of the sitcom The Office, below. First however, we need to define “cringe humor” also known as “embarrassment humor.”

We live in the “age of cringe” (Schwanebeck, 2021). Schwanebeck puts the beginning of the age of cringe as the early 2000s. Of course, awkwardness has existed since Adam and Eve had to cover themselves up—that's not the point. The point is that awkwardness, embarrassment and cringe are one of the defining themes of humor from the 2000s onward.

Cringe humor is defined as humor in which the hearer experiences vicarious embarrassment on behalf of one or some of the participants in the humor (Hye-Knudson, 2018; Schwanebeck, 2021).

In this chapter, we will consider how the alt-right (see Chapter 1) uses humor to recruit new followers by presenting their propaganda under the guise of humor/satire/irony and tries to take advantage of the retractability of humor (“I was just kidding”).

Is the Right Even Funny?

The title of this section may seem peculiar, after all, why wouldn't the right be funny? Admittedly, the Nazis were not particularly known for their sense of humor, but surely we would expect less extreme forms of right wing groups to have humor. However, there is a general sense in the academic community of humor researchers that right wingers are just unfunny. In fact, Young (2020) is a book dedicated to explaining why conservatives prefer outrage to irony and satire. The problem is that indeed a lot of right-wing humor will be absolutely unfunny to the average reader because of the problems we discussed in Chapter 3 that is, the unavailability of the scripts required to understand the joke.

However, Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022) provide evidence, based on viewership data, that not only is the right producing humor and satire, but that it is quite successful (for example, Gutfeld! had excellent ratings of over two million viewers, beating all other late night satirical news shows, in 2021).

The Alt-Right Propaganda Machine

Having established that the right does produce successful humor and satire, Sienkiewicz and Marx argue that the right is using them to recruit and radicalize supporters. The idea, well developed in Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022; see also Greene, 2019), is that mainstream shows such as Gutfeld! or publications such as Babylon Bee, or podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, through a complex network of promotions, recommendations and advertisement funnel an audience toward increasingly radical material that culminates in explicit white suprematism, Nazi propaganda and recruitment. For a more detailed discussion of Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022), see Attardo (2023).

This is not just speculation. Bowman-Grieve (2013) shows that “whites only” dating sites promote discussion, interaction and the formation of interpersonal bonds and relationships among white supremacists and therefore contribute to the recruitment and radicalization of the recruits in terrorist groups.

In this chapter, we will describe the “Cheryl's she shed” meme cycle. The term “meme cycle” is a deliberate calque on “joke cycle” the term used by folklorists to describe groups of jokes, usually thematically related. The theoretical purpose is to engage the concept of memetic drift, which we introduced in Chapter 2, in more detail and to go beyond it by introducing the idea of semantic bleaching and considering memes as syntactic constructions as the end result of memetic drift.

Joke Cycles

Consider this example:

This was the “original” light bulb joke, variants of which swept the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Light bulb jokes were centered around the “changing a light bulb” situation, which, as everyone knows, is normally performed by one person climbing on a ladder or chair and manually screwing in the light bulb in the socket. In the jokes, an unusually high number of people were required (e.g., six or seven), which is of course incongruous, and this incongruity was partially (very partially!) justified by the fact that they engaged in a very unorthodox way of doing so, which introduced another incongruity, for example by having one person stand on a table and the other six turning the table (or worse, the ceiling). The invited inference was of course that the group of people changing a light bulb in such an inefficient and counterintuitive way must be stupid, which was confirmed by the mention of the ethnicity of the group (Polish, in the original joke). The stereotype for stupidity was thus both confirmed and served as resolution (justification) of the incongruous behavior. I discuss light bulb jokes in some detail in Attardo (2001). For the shallow nature of such groupings, see Hempelmann (2003).

What made lightbulb jokes interesting to me, as a linguist, was not so much that these jokes targeted originally Polish-Americans, and the reasons behind this and other ethnic jokes, masterfully explored in Davies (1990).

Part 2 is concerned with memes, arguably the most Web 2.0 innovation in humor. The section is bookended by two slightly more technical chapters, in which I deal with memetic drift and with virality and its staying power, or lack thereof. The other chapters deal with more “fun” topics, such as Boaty McBoatface, Grumpy Cat, Pastafarianism and the Chuck Norris facts.

A memeplex is a cluster of memes. The significant aspect of a memeplex is that the memes that form it are mutually supporting. For example, in the traditional patriarchal society we have a meme that considers husbands to be dominant over wives. We also have a meme that only men are allowed to be priests or preach. Clearly, then, these two memes mutually support one another and thus it becomes easier for both memes to replicate. At the upper end of the spectrum of complexity a memeplex is an ideology. At the lower end, trends in popular music or fashion are often a memeplex: think of the early Beatles’ music, their hairdos and their clothing. By providing a complete “image” their memes could spread more easily.

Pastafarianism is a humorous religion which has developed a series of related memes that support each other. Let's start from the beginning: in 2005, Bobby Henderson founded the religion to demand that Pastafarianism be taught along with evolution and intelligent design, in Kansas schools. The Kansas Board of Education had voted that “intelligent design” should be taught along evolution. Henderson's point was that if a religious viewpoint, which has no scientific standing, was going to be taught in schools, then why not teach that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) had created the Earth, fossils and all? The FSM creation myth parodies the biblical creation narrative, but includes a beer volcano and mentions that Adam and Eve live in the Olive Garden of Eden (Olive Garden is a pseudo-Italian food chain, quite popular in the United States).

Henderson posted his letter to the Board of Education on his website, where it went viral (https://web.archive.org/web/20070407182624/http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/). In 2006, he published The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which has sold over 10,000 copies and been translated in several languages. Other books include The Loose Canon (http://www.loose-canon.info/Loose-Canon-1st-Ed.pdf) and The New Testament of The Flying Spaghetti Monster: Dinner 2.0 (https://unitarianchurchofpasta.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/for-free-here3.pdf). Henderson still maintains an active website (http://venganza.org). According to Bauer (2018), Pastafarianism has “tens of thousands” of adherents, primarily in Western countries (North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand).

As we saw in the previous chapter, memes are self-replicating units of meaning, the analog of genes in biology. What we did not discuss in the previous chapter is that genes and therefore memes are the locus of evolution. Darwin's splendid insight was the evolution depends on three mechanisms: variation, selection and replication. Variation is provided by the individual producing a new meme or a variant of an old one. Selection is provided by the choices of other users to adopt or share the meme, rather than another one. For example, as we will see in Chapter 15, the Chuck Norris Facts memes were preceded by the Vin Diesel Facts and by Mr. T Facts. However, at some point, the users selected the Chuck Norris ones and the Vin Diesel and Mr. T facts more or less disappeared. In other words, memetic selection is literally choosing which memes to share/modify.

In the case of internet memes, “replication” is not a direct equivalent of what happens in the biological world. Viruses “reproduce” by infiltrating a cell of the host, using the mechanisms of the cell to produce more viruses, until the cell releases the viral particles (and usually dies). None of that happens for memes (thankfully! I’d hate it if my head exploded each time I learn something new…). Replication for memes means the reposting, sharing, forwarding, etc., of a meme. This is primarily what we refer to when we say that a meme has “gone viral”: we mean that the meme spreads fast, like a virus.

Produsage

As we also saw in the previous chapter, internet memes are associated with the rise of social media and more generally of the web 2.0, that is, the active participation of the users in the production of content. The concept of produsage (Bruns, 2008), a portmanteau word consisting of production + usage, well describes the idea of user-led production of cultural artifacts (memes). Contrast, for example, a product, like Microsoft Word, or a script of a movie. These products are meant to be used, or enjoyed, rather passively. One can marginally customize MSWord, but, by and large, the software or the movie are finished products to be used.

This final part of the book attempts to cast some light on some of the darkest, most disturbing corners of the internet.

The first chapter of this part, “The use of humor by the alt.right,” considers its strategy used to recruit new followers to present their propaganda under the guise of humor, taking advantage of the retractability of humor (“I was just kidding”).

The second chapter considers some of the humor on 4chan, a website that allows anonymous posting. In particular, we examine the practice of trolling that is, the posting of deliberately inflammatory posts to elicit outrage, and lulz, the laughing at the victim of a trolling incident.

The last chapter considers the adoption of cartoon mascots by right wing groups.

In many ways, these were the hardest chapters to write. One of the nice perks of studying humor is that one's data tend to be fun, amusing and entertaining. The humor we will consider in this section is rarely so wholesome. In fact, short of snuff movies, it comprises some of the vilest, most disgusting, most depressing material in circulation. Yet it is crucial that it be examined and brought out into the light.

Nietzsche said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” As I delved into the cesspool of the alt-right humor, I found myself fondly remembering the “asteroid for president” memes I had seen in 2020 (Figure P4.1). Perhaps humanity is not worth saving, if we go by these specimens.

It is very difficult to maintain a detached, objective, dare I say, scientific stance when dealing with this sort of material. I tried my best to do so, because to simply reject trolling or racist humor as not funny means forgoing the possibility of understanding the phenomenon and/or understanding why some people find it funny, let alone what they do with it. Having said this, I will issue a blanket disclaimer: I do not endorse, approve or even find funny any of the humor discussed in this part. So, holding our noses pinched firmly shut, let's dive in.

Consider the following headlines:

• 1) Louisiana Man Arrested for Possession of Too Many Sharks, Meth in Bayou

• 2) Drunk Partygoer Falls Off Roof Attempting To Jump Off Roof

• 3) Embryos can be listed as dependents on tax returns, Georgia rules

• 4) Police Did Great Job, Police Say

• 5) Upset over LGBTQ books, a Michigan town defunds its library in tax vote

• 6) Study Finds Fewer Millennials Choosing To Become Good Parents

• 7) Meta warns its new chatbot may not tell you the truth

• 8) Biden: U.S. Won't Rest Until Brittney Griner Returned Home To Serve Marijuana Possession Sentence

Which ones are real headlines from real newspapers and which are fake headlines published in the Onion, the famous satirical news website? The answers are in this footnote. The very fact that a quiz like the one above is possible and the very real probability that you—dear reader—will get some of the answers wrong is one of the biggest differences between humor in the digital age and humor “before the internet.” But before we get to this, let's back up a little and start by defining what defines satirical news as opposed to fake and real news.

Wikipedia's definition of Satirical News Website is as follows:

Wikipedia gets it right: satirical websites pretend to be the news to satirize the news or the newsmakers. Fake news websites pretend to be the news to trick their readers into believing something false or misleading and/or profit from their attention, either through advertising exposure (ads on the same page) or pay-per-click payments.

In 2016, the British Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) decided to let the Internet suggest a name for a $287 million polar research ship. The poll went viral and among other hilariously inappropriate suggestions Boaty McBoatface was the winner, with 124,109 votes. The sore losers at NERC did not follow the poll, and named the ship Sir David Attenborough, but in a sop to the masses named one of the autonomous submarines on board Boaty McBoatface. The whole PR fiasco is chronicled in the Wikipedia page on Boaty; see also Rogers (2016), Golshan (2016) and Phillips and Milner (2017, pp. 164–168). What interests us in this little story is, first of all, that the risk of the PR stunt of having an open poll was predictable. This strategy is a good one, in theory: that 125,000 people might even be aware of the existence of NERC is a PR major feat, with zero cost. A publicist's dream. Indeed, Golshan (2016) reports that the NERC spokesperson was “delighted” by the fracas. The whole story itself went viral, as attested by the press coverage, including an article by the NY Times, NPR, the Guardian and many more. It got to the point that a British minister took a position in favor of Boaty. Of course there were numerous complaints about the refusal of the NERC to follow the results of the poll and name the boat after Sir David Attenborough. My favorite comment on the subject was the suggestion that Sir Attenborough change his name to Boaty McBoatface.

Antecedents to Boaty

As I said, the risk was predictable. There had been several antecedents of attempts by various authorities to harness the internet as cheap public relations. In 2012, Slovak lawmakers in Bratislava rejected an online vote to name a bridge after Chuck Norris: “Despite 12,599 votes for the Norris name in a two-month online poll, Bratislava regional assembly decided to call the bridge spanning the Morava river and Slovakia's border with Austria the ‘Freedom Cycling-Bridge’ in memory of people killed attempting to escape communist eastern Europe.” (Reuters, 2012)

The use of the Chuck Norris meme to mock the choice of the Bratislava Regional Assembly, which received only 457 votes, was not however the first or the largest such case.

The explosion of niche narrowcasting and the geek culture of the internet began a new breed of hyper-sophisticated but low-quality graphics cartoons. Inspired by Dilbert's easy to produce characters, XKCD stick figures and Dinosaur Comics recycled images that do not change from strip to strip (“fixed art”) read like visual self-parodies, in which the author self-consciously decides to not even try to produce visually appealing cartoons. The Order of the Stick, a webcomic set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) even in the title references its stick figure art.

Narrowcasting

The term “narrowcasting” was introduced to “emphasize the rejection or dissolution of the constraints imposed by commitment to a monolithic mass-appeal, broadcast approach” (Licklider, 1967). Licklider, in what was a truly prophetic call, envisions a television network (this was the 1960s, a good 20 years before the internet!) in which the “audience divides itself into many subsets” and thus the network can offer “a multiplicity of programs, services, and techniques, using a multiplicity of channels” (1967, p. 212). Licklider saw that this was not only more efficient but that the content can be designed to appeal to select groups “of medium and even small size” (p. 215). Naturally, Licklider who imagined a network of computers reaching individual homes to access libraries and classrooms would have been appalled by Facebook, Twitter, and Pornhub. However, his visionary intuition of the fact that “niche marketing” (as narrowcasting has been called in advertising) would mean that extremely narrow (i.e., small) “discourse communities” could be effectively reached and could sustain the production of content (art, video, cartoons, etc.) perhaps not necessarily economically, but certainly in the currency of the internet: attention (which can be monetized through platforms such as YouTube, Patreon, etc.). Through platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit and so on, anyone can become a narrowcaster (and if they are lucky and go viral, a broadcaster). In fact, the raison d’être of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and so on, is to lead people to share content. Furthermore, the internet effectively abolishes the location issue. One can produce and distribute videos, cartoons or any other digital media liter-ally in one's bedroom, wherever that might be. No need to get in a bus to Los Angeles or New York (or Paris, Moscow, Beijing, etc.) to try and become a star. Just fire up your computer or smartphone.

What is 4chan (Figure 23.1)? As the website helpfully informs us, it is an “image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images. There are boards dedicated to a variety of topics.” Topics include anime and manga, video games, sports, origami, do it yourself, advice, food and cooking, and of course pornography. It should be noted that this is the original 4chan .or g; a new, “safe for work” version can be found at 4channel .or g; the latter does not have the NSFW (not safe for work) boards indicated in red. So, why is it widely considered to be one of the principal gathering spaces of trolls and hackers, the source of many extremely popular memes, the birthplace of Anonymous and one of the bases of the alt-right? It all comes down to the fact that 4chan allows anonymous posting. In fact, most posts are credited to “Anonymous.” This also explains why the hackivist collective was also called Anonymous.

4chan was started in 2003 by a Christopher “moot” Poole, who was part of the endearingly named “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse” a part of the “Something Awful” forums. The details are essentially irrelevant. Poole stepped down in 2015 as part of the backlash on the “Gamergate” controversy, and it was announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura had purchased the website. (Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan)

As we mentioned, 4chan is known for being the gathering place of the alt-right. Obviously, this is unrelated to origami enthusiasts. The board known as /pol/(short for “Politically Incorrect”) is your go-to place if you are looking for racist, misogynist or openly fascist images and discussions. When I visited to check out that the place was as bad as reported, I found within seconds memes openly praising Hitler, racist posts freely using the N-word, bestiality, attacks on Freemasonry, anti-Covid vaccine propaganda and of course anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Figure 23.2 shows the first page of /pol/.

In this chapter we will consider 4chan as the historical epicenter of some of the phenomena of the most fringe and radical alt-right but also as the cultural background in which a general attitude of aggressive behavior/humor has emerged, known as trolling. From a strict humor-centric standpoint, there is nothing new here. Aggressive, ridiculing and derisive humor has been used to build in-group solidarity and conversely to “other” an out-group since the earliest records of humor.

Stuff White people Like (SWPL), as it has become known, started out as a blog by Christian Lander and Myles Valentin in 2008. Lander is white; Valentin is part Filipino. The blog went viral, and a book was released that same year, single authored by Lander (Lander, 2008). A second book followed in 2010, as well as a set of cards: Stuff White People Like (to Talk About): 50 Ways to Start Conversations with Caucasians in 2011. Since it would be too complex to try and disentangle authorship, I refer to the author of the blog as Lander and Valentin, regardless of when the text was actually produced.

The blog is still available, but is frozen at entry #136 in 2010. It reports, as of December 2022, more than 100 million hits. Among the list of “stuff” are TED conferences, Vespa Scooters, Moleskine notebooks, hummus, The Onion, Facebook, appearing to enjoy classical music, grammar, bad memories of high school, study abroad, irony, Apple products, wine, David Sedaris and Farmer's markets. Some topics are explicitly about race: Barack Obama, being the only white person around, having black friends, black music that black people don't listen to anymore (jazz, blues and “old school” hip hop), but the majority of topics are consumerist and/or cultural. The format of the pieces is fairly uniform: they are short essays, illustrated with generic images, that make a few humorous points about the phenomenon, generally couched in the form of observations about white people; for example, in the Grammar piece, we find: “Without a doubt, the rule system that white people love the most is grammar. It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others.” (https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/12/99-grammar/)

My interest in SWPL is motivated by the fact that it has been the object of a sophisticated analysis in Walton and Jaffe (2011), Grzanka and Maher (2012), and Jaffe (2016). However, despite the fact that Walton and Jaffe and Grzanka and Maher make some claims about the humorous nature of SWPL, no actual discussion of the humor is included. I intend to remedy this lacuna and at the same time engage some of the more interesting points. I think that these authors miss or deliberately choose to ignore (part of) the joke.

Photobombing derives its humorous nature from the incongruity of a forced reversal of the roles of the figure and selected aspects of ground in the image. The term “photobombing” seems to have been coined in 2009 (Wikipedia). It does not appear prior to 2008 in Google Ngram. Zimmer & Carson (2011, p. 473) narrow it down to a post on May 22, 2008. Most definitions of photobombing assume the intentionality of the act of photobombing: Know Your Meme defines photobomb as a practical joke. The top definition of photobomb in Urban Dictionary reads, in part, “Intentionally posing in other people's photos.” As we will see that is not entirely correct; to be fair another definition on Urban Dictionary hits the nail on the head: “Any time the background of a picture hijacks the original focus.”

Know Your Meme lists a large number of websites dedicated to photobombing and lists several particularly viral photobombs. Let us examine some examples, choosing among the viral cases. When the image of two copulating dogs appears in the background of a beachside picture of two friends, what should be an otherwise unremarkable detail of the background is brought to the foreground and the script opposition between the scene in the foreground (contextualized as such by the literal framing of the image) and the scene in the background. Consider that if the two dogs had been merely walking by, this would not be a photobomb. So, what should have been an unremarkable element of the ground becomes a figure, but a parasitic one: it is not the intended figure, which the photographer had chosen, framed the image around, etc.

The photobomb may be intentional or unintentional (see the contrasting definitions in Zimmer & Carson, 2011). In the former case, the gaze of the photobomber has to be directed at the camera. If the gaze of the photobomber is not directed at the camera, we have no particular reason to assume that the photobomb is intentional. A potential exception to this may be movie star Bill Murray, who is well-known as a photobombing aficionado. Notice that photobombs by animals fall within the same category. Animals have intentionality, just like humans. They may not know that the camera is taking their picture, but they know that the camera is an object and that they are gazing at it.