Never On Sunday

My friend Tim has only recently discovered the Leroy Jenkins meme and, with it, several other classic YouTube recordings from or about World of Warcraft. He never played WoW. For a computer gamer, that alone is unusual, but for a fan of computer “RPGs” like Diablo and Fallout, it’s downright bizarre. So now we’re getting periodic email asking whether we’ve seen this or that video. Of course we have. We played WoW. Which is why Tim figures the videos might be of interest.

Internet memes that go viral have much in common with top ten hits a generation ago: entertaining once, twice, maybe ten or twelve times if you want to sneak back and memorize them for geeky quotation purposes, but sooner or later you just wish they’d go away, perhaps that they’d never been made in the first place. And it’s slightly weird to have someone come by years later, totally unaware that it was played at all, much less overplayed to the point of eye-rolling, and ask, “Hey, have you ever heard this song? It’s awesome.” I wonder if readers of the 18th century were occasionally surprised to be asked whether they’d ever heard of this Shake-spear guy, it’s pretty good.