beanytuesday

Going Viral [content warning]

Added 2020-03-04 20:51:50 +0000 UTC

I am of two minds on this joke: on the one hand, it relies heavily on topical internet humor and crude sex jokes, two things I'm trying to wean away from, but on the other, it also holds an undertone of bleak satire (or at least tries to). There's a quote from Rocco Botte of Mega64 that I always come back to as part of my philosophy towards comedy; its something to the effect of "its easy to take add bits of comedy into something serious, but its more impressive to take something very silly and add serious/emotional impact to it". I'd like to think this sort of philosophy can elevate comedic style a higher tier than is usually attained by standard viral internet fare, but who knows?

There was an alternate ending for this comic, where the protagonist himself tweeted out the final meme himself; in this bittersweet version of the ending, he doesn't actually kill himself but instead gives in to the reality that the easiest way to achieve fame and recognition is to produce the hollow, mediocre viral content we are all intimately familiar with, rather than works of fine art. Its not as if the fine arts aren't hollow and banal in their own way, of course, but that's a different discussion.