There was even backlash accusing GMA of whitewashing the Kermit meme by erasing its black comedian origins. Mocking of GMA as an out of touch corporate enterprise ensued, as well as the inevitable corrections that frogs are amphibians, not lizards. Tea lizard! Predictably, Twitter lost its collective mind. (I just want to pause here so I can imagine reading the previous sentence to Jim Henson in 1977 and wonder how he’d react to the idea of his character thriving in a bizarre, complex world Henson would never live to see.)īut That’s None of My Business enjoys blue-chip meme status to this day, but was given a brief boost on June 21st, 2016 when Good Morning America infamously tweeted a collage of popular memes and used the hashtag #tealizard to describe Kermit. This trend reached peak popularity in the days following June 20th, 2014, when an Instagram account was created to highlight the best of Kermit’s shade throwing and gained over 130,000 followers. There are two main incarnations of But That’s None of My Business: one of Kermit drinking tea in a 2014 Lipton advertisement, and the other of Kermit sipping milk through a straw in the very first episode of The Muppet Show (skip to about four minutes in, you’ll know it when you see it). Many of these witty social observations originated in black internet subculture and made the rounds in those circles before reaching the internet at large. How could he NOT occasionally take over the internet?Īccording to Google Trends, the most popular Kermit meme is what Know Your Meme calls “But That’s None of My Business.” It typically features Kermit nonchalantly drinking a beverage and calling out questionable behavior or hypocrisy, asserting at the end “but that’s none of my business.” I think it’s meant to play Kermit as a gossipy casual observer, and often a condescending one. He is the most interesting frog in the world. There is not one, but two Kermit puppets behind glass at the Smithsonian. Kermit has competed on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and made the rounds on daytime and late night talk shows with multiple generations of hosts. And he has appeared in hundreds of episodes of The Muppet Show and Sesame Street and starred in dozens of films, so the internet holds a dizzying array of Kermit photos to form the basis of memes. His static ping-pong ball eyes and relative lack of features make him dependent on body language, props, and captions to express emotions. His simple character design has remained virtually unchanged for over 60 years, making him instantly recognizable and easy to edit and remix. Yet decades before Reddit and Imgur, Kermit was already the perfect candidate to become all those things. When Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog in 1955, he surely had no idea that his puppet would go on to become a timeless cultural icon, a celebrity in his own right, and most recently, an internet meme sensation. The following post originally appeared here on Trend Explainer. I thought this post would fit well on The Real Tangent, so I’m sharing it here as well. The premise was I’d dive into why certain Google Trends graphs look the way they do by explaining the moments in culture that define their interesting twists and turns. I originally wrote this piece for a spin-off blog I no longer update called Trend Explainer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |