When I posted my first meme to the internet Friday I didn’t expect it to get viewed 600,000 in a couple of days. I didn’t expect that it would end up making the front page of reddit and imgur. And I certainly didn’t expect to obsess over it checking in every couple of hours to see if I got more up-votes. In fact when I posted the meme all I thought was “Ok, I don’t look terrible in this picture. This is a short joke that usually gets a laugh. Let’s see if this gets me anymore traffic to UnScene Comedy or my youtube channel or maybe gets me a couple of new twitter followers.”
I posted the joke at 2 or 3pm I think, on Friday. At 1am Saturday I got a new friend request and a message that said “You’re going viral on imgur front page”. I was surprised that the joke did so well. Why would so many people want to see my picture? I’m not a cat! Also, it’s not the best joke. I mean it’s alright, it’s pretty consistent but does it deserve as much attention as it’s gotten? Maybe it’s the game “Twister” that made people enjoy it. Maybe it was the title “The Creepiest Board Game”. Maybe, just maybe it’s because the brick that is 7th from the right and the 5th one down is so much darker than the other bricks. Perhaps it’s not any of that, perhaps I’m just prettier than I thought. I don’t know. All I know is that I am now terrified to post any more of these because there’s no way that the next one can do as well as this one and I’m gonna be really disappointed sitting there waiting for it to hit 2,000 views. Like, “What’s wrong? Did the internet break? How could this be?”
Seriously though. I’ll post the image below. Then I’ll talk about the rest of my week like I normally do and then I’ll finish up this blog post by talking a little more about some of the weird thoughts that went through my head while the view count on this image kept climbing.
via UnScene Comedy
Monday – Of course I hosted the comedy show at Sally O’Briens. It was a great time, as always.
Tuesday – Hosted Stadium in Quincy. The debates are just getting better and better, and we even had a couple of audience members for the open mic that ended up participating in the debate after.
Wednesday – I edited the Scary Funny episode for the podcast and posted it to the web. It’s halloween themed this week so check it out. Then I went to try out a couple of new jokes at The Tavern at The End Of The World, hosted by the lovely Phoebe Angle.
Thursday – For the first time in maybe a year I went to Rafferty’s in Marshfield to hang out/tell jokes with my buddy Chrissy Kelleher. Good times.
Friday – 3pm I posted the image above. Then I took the night off from comedy and went to my brothers house to play poker with some friends.
Saturday – I performed on the live recording of The Hadron Gospel Hour, an amazing podcast produced by some of the nicest people I’ve met since doing comedy.
Ok. Now I will tell you more about the response to the image above. I have had a lot of people tell me that the internet is a terrible place and that if there is something that gets a bunch of comments, most of them will be awful. That was not my experience. Even in cases where someone kind of shit on me another person would usually step in to defend me. At one point someone complained about all this “frat humor” on the internet and “what ever happened to George Carlin”. The implication being that I’m a dumb Bro. Now this upset me. To think that this person is judging me as a comedian based on this one silly joke that I wrote.
First of all it is not ideal to have to post these pics with jokes on the internet. I wish people would just show up to a comedy club to see me but nobody knows who I am yet. So I have to do things like this to get noticed. So I finally caved and posted one of these. I posted this particular joke, not because I thought it was smart or to make a political statement but quite simply because it was my shortest joke that I knew worked.
The nicest comment I got was: “Im with most Imgurians in being against shitty comedians posting their shitty jokes, but this one is actually pretty good.” from a person that goes by the handle KungFuZero
The worst comment I got was: “fuck off kunt” -anonymous.
So it wasn’t so bad reading the comments.
Worth noting. I didn’t gain more than 2 or 3 twitter followers as a result of this, which is also fine since I don’t post there very often anyway.
fuck off kunt