This might explain the performative formality of much of āLOLspeak,ā or the winkingly silly tone of early internet discourse; consider phrases like āyou, sir, have won the internetā or ā[tips fedora]ā or its inverse, the performative infantilization of āoh hai!ā or the later ādoggo.ā āThe narwhal bacons at midnightā is perhaps the prime example of such humor: quirky and weird but ultimately wholesome. That there is zero edge to LOLspeak is part of what makes it cringe, in the same way watching people who are bad at improv do improv is cringe. There is an earnestness, a lack of self-awareness, an element of theater-kiddom to it. āWeāre dealing with a time on the early internet before people had to navigate through a million layers of irony to understand a meme,ā Caldwell says.
Instead, the natural gatekeeping within communities came from the fact that you were there at all, not necessarily the impenetrability of the memes. The conversations that were happening on Reddit were not, for the most part, simultaneously happening on YouTube or Twitter or Tumblr, but a new user to any of these platforms likely wouldnāt have too much trouble parsing the language. You neednāt be part of the old guard of Something Awful admins to understand a rage comic or wojak meme, for instance, and you donāt have to be chronically online to laugh at ultra-viral internet videos like āCharlie Bit My Finger,ā āEnd of Ze World,ā or 2006ās iconic āShoes,ā a song about a shopping-obsessed teen girl whose parents just donāt understand. These sorts of internet shorts didnāt look like anything else in mainstream media at the time; they were, physically and spiritually, online.
- How millennialsā āepic baconā humor became cringe - Vox
