The “May the Fourth Be With You” meme is the perfect example of the internet killing a joke.
“May the Fourth Be With You” could have been cute pre-social media (in fact, it may have been, was it?) perhaps on a t-shirt or on an office bulletin board. A co-worker brought in donuts today with a May the Fourth… sign. It was a nice gesture.
But May the Fourth… and all permutations were on display on social media all day today and it illustrates the beating of a dead joke. First you have the original joke: “May the Fourth Be With You.” This elicits a chuckle – it did from me the first time I heard it – and it gets shared. And shared. And shared. And shared to the point that people start joking on the joke. May the Third Be With You. May the Fifth Be With You. April the Eighteenth Be With You. I guy I went to college with took this joke to its natural conclusion and tweeted the date in this manner every single day for a year.
And then meta jokes start. I myself feigned knowledge of the whole thing and commented, “I don’t follow” on people’s status because I’m oh so clever.
And then my friend Pat sent me a link from reddit offering tributes to Adam Yauch because today is the anniversary of his death and I forgot all about resenting a dumb joke.
I’m a big Beastie Boys fan but I’m not going to gush about Yauch. I obviously didn’t know him personally and I’m not a fan of online tributes to celebrities. Hearing of his death was kind of like hearing about the death of a teacher that you had in high school who you really liked. It doesn’t affect your every day life but that person was a part of your life’s tapestry and now they’re gone (apropos of nothing: RIP Mr. Countryman).
He was 47 when he died. I’m 41. It seems crazy that my life could end in six years or, to put myself in the shoes of Mike Diamond or Adam Horovitz, that a friend could die in six years.
My mind always goes there. Things are going well in my life right now. In the way that everything fell apart last summer, things have come together this year and now, against the advice of my therapist, I get to thinking, “Okay, what’s coming to fuck this up?”
I never know.
But for now, enjoy a very cool, little seen Beastie Boys video for “Shadrach” from Paul’s Boutique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndskI0j-qkQ
Also, Star Wars ‘n shit.
