Category Archives: Digital

Difficult Difficult Lemon Difficult

Nationality: African-American (Ivory Coast/Scottish/Welsh)
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Shoreline, WA
Performance Date: 4/5/17
Primary Language: English

Context: My roommate discovered this meme one day, and it prompted a discussion about the various levels of depth it reached.

Background: My roommate is a self-described “conveyor of fine memes” and has a hobby of collecting, creating, and sharing Internet memes.

The Meme: The meme (attached to this post) is a play on the phrase “easy peasy lemon squeezy.” The phrased is reworked in a text explanation that laments the fact that things are not “easy peasy lemon squeezy” as once believed, but are in fact “difficult difficult lemon difficult.” This explanation is accompanied by the image of a middle-aged woman furiously gripping a laptop in both hands and biting into it.

Analysis: This became a folklore discussion as a surprise, as the further my roommate and I discussed it, the more it seemed to work as a piece of folk speech. “Difficult difficult lemon difficult” is definitely an evolution of the saying “easy peasy lemon squeezy,” which itself has an origin that feels meaningless in the context the phrase has since gained. The specific discovery of the newly-changed saying also has the context of being in meme form, memes being one of the more common areas of unauthored expression in the 21st century.

Shazaam, Staring Sinbad

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Francisco, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2017
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: There’s a big community of people on the internet that are convinced that as children they used to watch a movie about a genie called ‘Shazaam’, where Sinbad played him. The thing is there is apparently no such movie, but for some reason people collectively remember it. Some have even posted pictures of the VHS cover of ‘Shazaam’ with pictures of Sinbad as the genie, but Sinbad assures he was never in that movie. There isn’t even an IMDb page for this thing. Most people think that these guys are just confusing it with the movie ‘Kazaam’, where Shaq O’Neal played a genie, but they swear that it was a different movie. This has lead to all sorts of theories and speculations. Some say that it is a conspiracy by the studio because the movie was a flop and they tried to erase it from existence. Some credit the Mandela effect, which is an alternate timeline theory that says that we have memories from ourselves in alternative timelines.

Background information about the piece by the informant: Jacob has a keen interest in knowledge in internet folklore. This story surfaced in recent years, and has been increasingly growing with more and more people claiming that they have seen this fake movie. He says that there’s many cases of collective memory in the internet, such as people being convinced that the children’s books “The Berenstain Bears” were actually called “The Berenstein Bears”.

Context on the piece: This phenomenon of collective memory is usually talked about in discussion boards such as Reddit or 4chan. The idea has been communicated and made popular by people commenting on it on bigger sites, like Youtube or Snope, which is how Jake knows about this.

Thoughts on the piece: I think this folk belief goes to show how much an idea can propagate among people to make them think it’s true. This shows that this can even create fake memories for people, as it seems that they are simply misremembering the title and star of the real movie ‘Kazaam’, yet refuse to believe it, going as far as to considering conspiracy theories on the matter. This makes the belief take an almost devoutly religious aspect to it, where the people are convinced that the movie had to be real and cannot cope with the fact that their memories could be fabricated.

For  more information and discussion on the phenomenon, see: http://www.snopes.com/sinbad-movie-shazaam/

All Star Memes

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Francisco, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2017
Primary Language: English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey5GItze-BY&t=10s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsSw_9oAFdI

Main Piece: These are mash up video memes on the internet that use the song ‘All Star’ by Smash Mouth as their basis. The song has also become a meme and has been used, edited and bastardised in every way possible by the internet. They are usually presented with a title that says ´All Star, but…’, followed by the alteration. For example, theres ‘All Star, but every time they say star it gets faster’, ‘All Star but it’s in the melody of Space Oddity’, ‘All Star but the lyrics are reversed and the music is fine’ and ‘All Star but all the instruments are Bill O’Reilly saying his name’. There are too many of these to mention, but the amount of things that one can do with that song is unbelievable. They know every single lyrics, note and accord.

Background information about the piece by the informant: Jake is an enthusiast and avid investigator of memes on the internet. According to him, the movie ‘Shrek’ has been a meme for at least the past 8 years. He is not sure why, but he assumes that it’s because the animation and the soundtrack are an outdated product of the early 2000s, which people like to ridicule. There is even an entire webpage dedicated to Shrek memes known as ‘ShrekChan’. ‘All Star’ is the opening song of the film, so it has also been used as a meme by the internet. It represents the seemingly outdated so soundtrack of the film, as its style is that of pop exclusive for the early 2000s.

Context on the piece: Since these memes do not have any actual jokes for the general public, the videos are only meant to be funny for the people familiar with the ‘Shrek’ ridicule of the internet. It is sort of an inside joke in which only a niche group of people will get the reference.

Thoughts on the piece: This meme creates a very specific in-group, as it is meant for a very narrow audience. It is meant for people who are avid meme and internet users that are not only familiar (and most likely grew up with) the Shrek films, but that also know and understand the widely non-generic and strange humor of the Shrek memes. This creates a strong community on the internet, just when there are people with an inside joke in real life that brings them together. I think this is in part due to the fact that this group was raised on these movies, and now that they are adult they enjoy taking the film and the opening song apart in a form of expression of transitioning form childhood to adulthood.

Man Door Hand Hook Car Door

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

Informant Information:

Joey Tan is a student at the University of Southern California studying Interactive Media and Game Design. She has a Chinese background, and is originally from Toronto, Ontario until moving to Los Angeles, CA for college.

Story:

“Ok so, so, a man and a woman were in a car and they drove to a forest to you know get the sexy times on and they were like making out, like you know light touching, and suddenly they heard a strange noise outside. And they stopped and the guy’s like ‘what is that sound?’ and the girl’s like ‘I don’t know I couldn’t really hear it that well’. So they went back to making out and getting it on, but suddenly they heard the strange noise again. This time they stop and the guy’s like ‘I’m gonna go check it out you stay here, don’t let anyone in, even if it’s someone asking for help. Don’t let anyone in.’ the girl says ‘yes’. So the guy leaves, the girl stays in the car, she doesn’t hear anything. She stays there for 10-15 minutes. She starts to worry because she’s hearing nothing and she’s like when’s he gonna come back. Suddenly she hears a long banging from the back of the car. Like from behind the car. She turns and sees nothing there but the banging continues. She sees someone scratching on the back of the car ‘Let me in’. She’s reminded of what the guy said and she doesn’t let them in. She stays there and after awhile the noise stopped. She didn’t know what to do, she ends up waiting until morning until it’s safer so she goes to sleep. She wakes up the next morning, the forest is still silent, there’s no one around, and she decides to leave to find her boyfriend. Just then, as soon as she left the car, she turned and noticed that man door hand hook car door. The end.”

Q: Where did you hear this from?

“My friend was sleeping over and he was like do you wanna hear this scary story and I’m like yeah. It took an hour to tell it which is the worst part.”

Q: Is this supposed to be messing around?

“He couldn’t stop laughing for 10 minutes straight, it was crazy.”

Analysis:

The informant mentioned that she did not know the origin of this story because she had only heard this from a friend. After doing more research, I found out that this “story” is actually a “meme” from a website called 4chan. Apparently, the original poster of this story wanted to make a parody of a creepypasta (a website for horror/scary stories, very much a part of internet culture) story, and by doing so created the “man door hand hook car” meme.

 

Cyber Ghost: Toads & Texts

Nationality: Jewish
Age: 18
Occupation: Cal Poly SLO Student
Residence: San Jose
Performance Date: March 12, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Hebrew

Informant: Michael Davis is a sophomore at Cal Poly SLO and is currently majoring Business. He does not really believe in ghosts and thinks that going on ghost hunts with his friends is exciting. His story takes place in an abandoned home that may have been an asylum in San Jose.

MD: “Back at home, my friends and I went to check out this abandoned home, or maybe it used to be an asylum. There were four of us, and we pulled up in the driveway of the abandoned house. When we got out of the car, we saw in the distance that there was another car with its headlights on. We also saw a toad in the middle of the driveway and it started croaking. We walked up to the house and saw that it was blocked off by a “Do Not Enter” sign. We went inside anyways and saw that there were chains on the floor of the house. As we went into one of the rooms, we found another toad that started croaking. We just hung out in there, because it was kinds like a competition of who could stay in the longest. We went on exploring the place but suddenly heard chains rattling, but the chains we saw were still on the floor and there were none hanging anywhere. After a few more minutes inside the house, one of my friend’s phone starting buzzing and going crazy and then he started to get these text messages on his phone. It said something like “Why are you here”. We freaked out all walked out of the house. Right after we got out, my friend was like “I swear I heard some quiet, old, scary voice telling us to get out.” Then right outside, before getting into our car again, we saw another croaking toad. On the drive back to out house, my friend’s phone kept getting text messages saying stuff like “why were you in the house”, “I know what you did in there”, “I know what happened in the house”. We tried calling the number, but every time there would be the automated voice saying that “this number does not exist”, but it was clearly texting my friend! And what was even more freaky was that after a couple of months of visiting that house, the same number texted again and asked “why they were in that house”.

Impact: “This is not the first time I’d gone into a haunted place looking for ghosts. I like ghost hunting because of the adrenaline and thrill of it. But this experience was one of my more extreme ones, because usually there are some creaking doors or maybe shadows. It was scary ‘cause my friend got the same text even after the whole incident. I also went home that day and researched about the toads we kept on seeing in and around the house. Turns out, according to some websites, seeing a toad three times or something is representative of a ghost presence.”

My thoughts: I got goosebumps while hearing MD’s story because personally, everything I hear my phone buzz from getting a text messages, I would wonder which one of my friends would contact me. But I would be really scared if I got a text message from “nobody” because texting involves physically typing, so I don’t know how the ghost’s message got translated electronically.