April Fools’ Day. A day for the longstanding tradition of hoaxes and pranks. A day for the gullible and uninitiated to fall for their peers’ jokes and japes. A 24-hour event where hijinks and tomfoolery can be found ‘round every corner. On the internet, every day is April Fools’ Day. April Fools’ … Days (~365-day edition). If that sounds unreliable, you can check firsthand by clicking this link. Or this one. Or this one.
Sorry not sorry for those jokes, me old chum, but it is all in the spirit of the game (the game of trickery, not The Game you just lost, sorry). If these varied hyperlinks make little sense to you, do not fear, for the one ruse this article will not play is that of leaving you uninformed about the wonderful world of web-based wisecracking.
This will not be a full compendium, but a starting guide for some and an annoying refresher for others. The analysis will be centered on bait-and-switch memes: jokes where the punchline is based on the irritation of the receiver upon realizing their desired content was switched out with an unwanted joke. Examples of these include this article’s first three hyperlinks, where, instead of bringing you further information, just bring you mild annoyance at “falling” for a fake hyperlink and give the linker great satisfaction for the successful switch.
The first of these is known as a Rickroll, where the media switched is the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The first half of the name comes from the artist’s own, and the video is often regarded as the most-linked troll, having reached 1 billion views in July of 2021. The -roll aspect comes from a preceding meme, a bait-and-switch of a bait-and-switch itself. In late 2006, moot, founder of 4chan, added a word filter to the imageboard website where instances of the word “egg” would be switched to “duck,” a play on the chicken and the egg. Past this first layer of baited-switched-ness, when someone tried to post “eggroll,” they would receive the output “duckroll.” In response to this filtered result, the Rickroll’s precursor was created: an edited picture of a mallard duck with wheels and Impact font text announcing its title. It was this image that would then be used throughout the site as the end-point of a hyperlinked text promising engaging content.
According to moot, it was only about half a year later that, on the videogame-specific board of 4chan, the first Rickroll occurred. The source of the uncertainty lies in 4chan’s anonymous formatting, where inactive threads are deleted and often archived. However, we do know that one of the earliest instances of a Rickrolling video was uploaded in May 2007, over two years before the official YouTube video (the one with over a billion views) was published. The original poster’s story, as shared in a Reddit “I am A” thread, aligns with moot’s own. Cotter548 says that with the huge buzz over the upcoming release of “Grand Theft Auto IV” he decided to take a spin on duckroll (get it?) and link a different YouTube video, his upload of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” while claiming it was a newly released trailer. Within 24 hours, it amassed 20,000 views; within seven days, almost 250,000. Today, it has over 94 million, though by the time the official release came around, Cotter548’s version had already amassed three million views.
Nowadays, Rickrolling is the reason many hover over a hyperlink before clicking, lest that dreaded synthesizer intro is to be found at the other end. To this day, I will check for “dQw4” at the beginning of a YouTube link in case it’s followed by “w9WgXcQ,” leading me to that dreaded trap. Try it here! If you’re on a computer, you can hover over the hyperlink with your cursor and see the address pop up in the bottom corner of your browser. If you’re on mobile, you can long press on the hyperlink and a preview of the page or URL should pop up. It’s genuinely good practice! Although it’s upsetting to fall victim to a Rickroll, the fear of getting-got unintentionally promotes online safety.
Oftentimes, though, the switch is built into the bait. You will be watching a relaxing video and then, suddenly, you have egg on your face. Or, more likely, you have a screaming zombie in front of it. By making the bait and the switch one and the same, you lessen the gambit of a friend clicking on a link; by the time they hit play, they’ve already lost. Modern variations’ naming conventions come from the ungrammatical use of the meme’s title as a past tense verb: “Get Stickbugged Lol,” “You’ve been Gnomed,” “You just got Coconut Mall’d,” “You just got Krissed” or “You just got Weezer’d.” The nature of memetics, the study of the spread of cultural fads through repetition, can be found in some of these trolls’ accompanying wording encouraging you to share your foolish misfortune “with friends.”
A non-bait-and-switch example of this is The Game. By the way, you just lost The Game (again, it was also mentioned in the opening paragraphs). The Game is a mind game that is won by ignoring it; the purpose of the game is to go without thinking of it for as long as possible. The twist is that, when you do lose, the encouraged behavior is to hit up your friends to announce you “just lost The Game,” making them losers, too. This is a fun insidious joke in its timelessness. Sometimes even hearing the word “game” or associating a moment with a loss makes just the wrong synapses fire — the only way to feel good about yourself again is to inflict that pain on others. It’s a fun game! The Game, that is.
Another funny little trick to play is that of unexpected hidden messages, lurking in familiar places, absolutely enraging you when they manifest. Most certainly, Loss.jpg. “Loss” is a four-panel comic from “Ctrl+Alt+Del,” a webcomic that has posted humorous strips about video games and gamer culture since the early 2000s. “Loss” differs from the rest of the series in that it is a tragically somber wordless story where the story’s female lead has a miscarriage. The magnitude of this tone shift cannot be overstated; the series was already widely mocked for its lame punchlines and literal stock characters (as in, Tim Buckley, the creator, had prefabricated assets of the leads copied and pasted for most comics). This strip, on the other hand, used no text to convey a horrible tragedy while everything else in the series used too many words to say nothing at all — it was weird, out of place and uncomfortable to reckon with. Although mockery deriving from this source can definitely be insensitive, the joke relies on the weird blocking of the two-by-two grid: a row of one upright figure and two upright figures, then another of two upright figures and an upright figure by a horizontal one by its end (I II, II I_). The trick is then to work this pattern into an unexpected design, like the patterns on a butterfly from a different meme, a punny Roman number joke or even simple mathematical explanations. The mental trap here is the dawning realization that the joke you were searching for was, in the end, played on you.
This last sentiment is the nature of these and all other internet pranks. Whether they be stumbled upon or forced on you by dear peers, the reaction generated is a mild annoyance at getting-got, from being tricked by a hyperlink to losing a meaningless competition to solving a phony puzzle. The fun of it comes from the immediate thought right after that of irritation dissipates being “I need to send this to my friend.” This is because, be it April Fools’ or not, fooling others on the internet is (and always will be) free real estate. Happy fooling!
Daily Arts Contributor Cecilia Ledezma can be reached at cledezma@umich.edu.