And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [39]
—would yield this:
COME KILL US, TERRORIST COMRADES!
Here is the treasonous revelation of the latest brilliant U.S. surveillance program, so that terrorists have an easy shot at massacring us—in this case, through anthrax-laced falafel nuggets.
And so on.
To try to reach different audiences, I tried to write different types of jokes for the site that would appeal to different audiences. Some jokes—such as the one cited above—were designed to appeal to liberals, by ridiculing right-wing hatred of the Times and of “the media” in general. In another such joke, the mouseover simply added a sentence; here is the before:
150 IRAQIS KILLED AS
SECTARIAN VIOLENCE WIDENS
An attack in a crowded market, seemingly aimed at Shiites, was one of ten separate acts of violence today in Baghdad alone. and the after:
150 IRAQIS KILLED AS
SECTARIAN VIOLENCE WIDENS
An attack in a crowded market, seemingly aimed at Shiites, was one of ten separate acts of violence today in Baghdad alone. By reporting this entirely true information, we hope to sap America’s fighting spirit!
Unlike this first type of joke, which was designed to reach out to the core Huffington Post audience, the second type of joke was more straightforwardly anarchic: simple irony with no political agenda. In these jokes, the caricature of right-wing views was pushed to such an extent that what really was being ridiculed was the caricature itself, as in the case where a generic Dining headline (IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT PAELLA) became COOKING WITH PLACENTAS AND COCAINE. Other similar jokes included this Sports headline—
CLINTONS PLAY SOCCER
WITH SEVERED HEAD OF VINCE FOSTER
—or, for that matter, the alternate title for the newspaper itself, which was dreamed up and added by my friend Brian, who so graciously and brilliantly engineered the site for me:
The Al-Qaeda Newsletter
(and Coupon Book)
My inclusion of the third type of joke, I admit, was shooting the moon, from a contagious-media point of view; but in the interests of science I figured I should make the attempt. This third type of joke consisted of actual parodies of the Times from a conservative perspective; i.e., these jokes could be taken as evidence that the point of the parody was in fact the opposite of its nominal point. Examples of such jokes could be seen in this headline from Metro, which mocked the Times’s reflexive pro-government slant on urban social services:
CITY TAX INCREASE FAILS
TO SEIZE ALL INCOME
or its sanctimoniousness on social issues in Sports:
YANKEES WIN, DESPITE HAVING
NO TRANSSEXUAL PLAYERS
Noting the contradictions among these three different joke types, a reader might have chalked it up to incoherence. But in fact it was a product of contagious engineering. One might call these joke types A, B, and -A, and though they shade into one another, they roughly break down as follows:
FIG. 3-1: JOKE SCHEMA, “RIGHT-WING N.Y. TIMES”
According to my hypothesis, these three different types of jokes, though disharmonious in certain aesthetic respects, would work together to spread the site—“What Right-Wingers See When They Read the New York Times,” as it was officially called, the rendering of which Brian finished in the early morning of August 1, just as the competition was getting under way—with a three-prong approach. First, enough core Huffington Post readers would become excited about the A jokes that it would become circulated in the left-wing blogosphere. Second, its B jokes—its anarchic, purely comedic elements—would then propel it out into the wider circle of blogs and e-mail traffic. Third, its -A jokes, hopefully subtle enough not to interfere with the A jokes, would actually find it a foothold in the conservative blogosphere as well, possibly convincing right-wing readers that “Will Murphy” was, at heart, one of them.
VIRAL JUNKIES
Does any pleasure more define our age than the thrill of unleashing an