Get your goat
Sometimes humanity can be pretty stupid. And the Internet loves to magnify that.
It’s only about four months old, but 2013 has already seen some online gems — the Harlem Shake, anybody? But my favorite sensations are the ones that seem to have emerged out of nowhere. A prime example is the goat fad.
It was late February, about midnight, and I was sitting in the lounge of my dorm, cranking out an essay that should have been started a few days earlier. My roommate walked in with her laptop, insisting I take a study break to watch a YouTube video. I shrugged — why not?
It was a Taylor Swift song, “Trouble,” that I didn’t particularly care for — I don’t particularly care for any of her songs — but I watched. And the gods from heaven smiled down on me and my essay and the cold February weather. Because when Taylor Swift was supposed to do her wail in the chorus, what emerged but a white goat with black spots with a piercing scream that echoed through the lounge.
There were tears in my eyes, tears of laughter and happiness and the source to the end of my essay’s monotony.
Analyzing the evolution of goat videos requires starting at the source — the goat itself. Domestic goats (capra aegagrus hircus) are some of the oldest domesticated species in the world and are part of Eastern European folklore and tradition, the Chinese zodiac and the Bible. In popular culture, goats have always been those awkward and maybe annoying house pets or signs of rural or agrarian life.
Goat videos, despite their recent popularity, are about five years old. It all started back in late 2007, when YouTube user SmoothFeather uploaded “Man Goat,”after getting over the surprise that the man’s screams were actually a goat’s, according to Internet culture website Know Your Meme.
From there, the video spread, spiraling to humor site I Am Bored on May 20, 2008. BuzzFeed then mashed up the screaming with the Usher song “Papers” in 2009c. Over the next few years, the Usher goat video steadily grew in popularity, and it now has hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
The Roosevelts, a humor and news website, uploaded a compilation video on Feb. 7 called “Goats Yelling Like Humans — Super Cut Compilation,” with videos like SmoothFeather’s of different goats screaming in very human-esque tones. It went viral within weeks and now has more than 15 million views.
Though humanity does love its stupid videos, the key to the fame of goat videos is in a more natural human emotion: surprise.
When watching a segment of a music video, a goat popping into the chorus is about the last thing anyone could ever predict. That’s why it works. That’s why the Harlem Shake works. That’s why Nigel Thornberry memes work. They’re the unexpected at its best.
Increasingly, we’re becoming a society of surprises. The things that work are the ones that are exaggeratedly out-of-the-box and strangely creative. Entertaining is becoming more difficult nowadays. It’s only clever if it’s never been done before. It’s only funny if it’s new. The viral memes are the ones that are the most surprising.
But there’s also the element of simplicity that drives these videos. Something as commonplace as a goat’s screams inserted in a popular song makes us remember that though the world is ever-changing and technology is growing increasingly complex, basic humor — such as the one built around a very human emotion and an extremely awkward animal — will never change.
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