funny essay copypasta

50+ Cursed, Funny, and Best Copypastas

A copypasta is a chunk of text that has been repeatedly copied and pasted on the web.

It’s known to be originated on 4chan, an image-based bulletin board.

An example of a copypasta is, “Don’t care + Didn’t ask + Cry about it + Stay mad + Get real + L”.

Copypastas are mainly used on Twitch and Discord.

On Twitch, people mainly use them to troll or annoy streamers.

Although a copypasta looks like it’s generated by AI, it’s actually written by a human and spread across the internet.

This list contains 50+ cursed, funny, and best copypastas for Twitch and Discord.

Cursed copypastas

Funny copypastas, best copypastas, twitch copypastas.

• When the person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain is giving the impression that something is questionable or dishonest, causing one to have the idea or impression that they are of questionable, dishonest, or dangerous character or condition.
• Dude I own this NFT. Do you really think you can get away with theft when you’re showing what you stole directly to my face. My lawyers will make an easy job of this case. Prepare to say goodbye to your luscious life and start preparing for the streets. I will ruin you.
• Number one. Steady hand. One day, Kim Jong Un need new heart. I do operation. But mistake! Kim Jong Un die! SSD very mad! I hide fishing boat, come to America. No English, no food, no money. Darryl give me job. Now I have house, American car and new woman. Darryl save life.
• This 👈👉 is money snek. 🐍🐍💰💰 Upsnek ⬆⬆🔜🔜 in 7.123 7⃣ 1⃣2⃣3⃣ snekonds 🐍🐍 or you ✋✋ will NEVER ❌❌❌❌ get monies 💰💰 again Beware!! ✋✋❌❌ You😏😏 don’t ❌❌ have much time!!🕛🕧🕐🕜🕑🕝🕝 You 😏😏 may never ❌❌get monies 💰💰🐍💰💰 again!!
• Noobmaster, hey it’s Thor again. You know, the god of thunder? Listen, buddy, if you don’t log off this game immediately I will fly over to your house, and come down to that basement you’re hiding in and rip off your arms and shove them up your butt! Oh, that’s right, yea just go cry to your father you little weasel.
• The 💰 specific 💰 views 💰 expressed 💰 by 💰 blitzchung 💰 were 💰 NOT 💰 a 💰 factor 💰 in 💰 the 💰 decision💰 we💰 made.💰 I 💰 want 💰 to 💰 be 💰 clear: 💰 our 💰 relationships 💰 in China 💰 had 💰 no💰 influence 💰 on 💰 our 💰 decision.💰
• wo’ah, earf, birming’am, fish n’ chips… long ago, the fou’ nations live togedah in ah’mony. then ev’ryfing changed when the IRA attacked…. only the avatah, mastah of all fou’ elements could stop ’em but when the queen needed ‘im most, ‘e vanished. 100 yea’s passed and me bruv and i found the new avatah. a fish n’ chips bendah named aang. although ‘is chipbendin’ skills ah great, ‘e still ‘as a lo’ to lea’n ‘fore ‘e’s ready to save anyone m8.
• Today when I walked into my economics class I saw something I dread every time I close my eyes. Someone had brought their new gaming laptop to class. The Forklift he used to bring it was still running idle at the back. I started sweating as I sat down and gazed over at the 700lb beast that was his laptop. He had already reinforced his desk with steel support beams and was in the process of finding an outlet for a power cable thicker than Amy Schumer’s thigh. I start shaking. I keep telling myself I’m going to be alright and that there’s nothing to worry about. He somehow finds a fucking outlet. Tears are running down my cheeks as I send my last texts to my family saying I love them. The teacher starts the lecture, and the student turns his laptop on. The colored lights on his RGB Backlit keyboard flare to life like a nuclear flash, and a deep humming fills my ears and shakes my very soul. The entire city power grid goes dark. The classroom begins to shake as the massive fans begin to spin. In mere seconds my world has gone from vibrant life to a dark, earth-shattering void where my body is getting torn apart by the 150mph gale force winds and the 500-decibel groan of the cooling fans. As my body finally surrenders, I weep, as my school and my city go under. I hate gaming laptops.
• If my girl👧😍 and my beyblades💯🔥 are both drowning🌊😦 and I could only save one😄☝️you can catch me letting it rip😤 at my girl’s funeral😅👻💀 cause it’s bey blade or catch a fade🙏👊😠💯😭
• What I think people who are not in the Greek System need to understand is that partying isn’t just something we do. It’s ingrained into our lives. Many people, these days, are perfectly content with sitting on their computers all day playing video games. I used to be a competitive gamer and I used to do this. After joining the Greek system, partying became a new norm that was ingrained into my life. We need it for our well-being. It helps us escape society. There have even been studies that show how necessary gatherings are for our well-being. The fact that it was stripped away from us, especially by something that barely affects us specifically is very detrimental to our mental state. People are giving us so much crap for it, yet they don’t know what it’s like for us to be deprived of everything that’s fun for us.
• ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷᘛ⁐ᕐᐷ RATS RATS WE ARE THE RATS WE PRAY AT NIGHT WE STALK AT NIGHT WE ARE THE RATS
• To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer’s head. There’s also Rick’s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they’re not just funny—they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Rick & Morty truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Rick’s existential catchphrase “Wubba Lubba Dub Dub,” which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev’s Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Dan Harmon’s genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens.
• grrrr jappan 🇯🇵 is best country in teh world (sekai) !!!!🤬😡!!!👹🤬!!!!! west bAd grrrgghhhg japenis culture⛩🎎🎏 better than amrican🗽🍔👎!!! (>~<) vendor machine eveywhere 🗼and sakura trees are so 🌸 a e s t h e t i c 🌸 UwU if u hate it then your NOT a man of culture so shinē!!! ~hmph baka -_- 🏮
• *jaw drops to floor, eyes pop out of sockets accompanied by trumpets, heart beats out of chest, awooga awooga sound effect, pulls chain on train whistle that has appeared next to head as steam blows out, slams fists on table, rattling any plates, bowls or silverware, whistles loudly, fireworks shoot from top of head, pants loudly as tongue hangs out of mouth, wipes comically large bead of sweat from forehead, clears throat, straightens tie, combs hair* Ahem, you look very lovely.
• Gregory, do you see the small vent on the floor? Have you ever heard of Among Us, Gregory? You need to vent. I know it will be hard for you to be sus, but i know you can do it Gregory.
• 😂G̭̺̙͔̦̖̭E̞̫͙T͕͇😂̩̩̭̗O̝̗̯̖͍͙̬͎U̲͎͕̳͓̱̖̯T̤😂̞̮͓̙O͍͉̥̻̣̺̩̗F͔̜̻͙̥̱ͅ😂̦͖͚͚̺͚M͙Y̘😂͉̝̘̖̮̜H̱̬̲̯E̘̗̥̹͚͕ͅA̠̰̳͇̻̖͇̬D̩͍̩͔̭͓😂͖̹G̻̞̺̬͓̫͙͔E̻̫̙̞T̹̙̹😂̞͙͔̣̪̩O͙̪̹͙͈̪͖̘U͍͚̱͖T̫̫̝̰̝😂̫̤̥̱̖̳̜O͎̼͔͖̥̩F͇̫̳͔̝😂̬͉M͎̙̤̦̰̱͙Y̫̭̜͚̦͈̰😂͈̖̰͎͉H̳̳̬͔͙̲ͅͅE̻͇̹̬̰̜̖̱A͈̜D̜̣͕̫̯̻̝̭😂̰G̠̲͔̻͔̙̯E̯͚̙̘T̙̜͍̳̩̣͕̭😂̠̪̪͎̱O̹̰̺͙̘̪̭̞̱U̻̮͔͈̠ͅT̫͍͖̪̞͚😂͎̖̥͇O͕̩̯̠̹̜͖F̗͉͚͈̤😂̘̠͈̲̦͉̠M̝͈̰̥̹̗̯ͅY̻͕̳͔̠̟̼̙̣😂̜̗̩̼͓͖H̪͍̞͓̟̠̼̻E̥̰͕̳̣͉̪̭A͔D̗̮😂͔̜̜͙̤̹̩G̗̤͙̩̤̳E̜̗̥̼̲̺T̫͇̞̺̞😂̭̩̦̹̹̭O̭̯͉̫͎̻̮U̮͇͇͔̗T̞̭̦̼̗̹😂̜̪͖͍O̰͓͎̘̜̙͕F̞̝̖😂̩̟͖̭͍̦M̺̖̙̺Y͙̫̤̺̠̰😂̞̫̩H̖̤͍̣͔̟ͅE̞̹̞̗̭̳Ḁ̗͚͔͖D͓͇̱͍̖͙ͅ😂͈̳G̟̫̣͎̞͖͔͇Ẹ̘̦̭ͅT̩̻͎̹͓̭😂̺̦̞͔̫̟O̫U̪̪̩T͉̻̰͎̙̹̣̯😂͍̲̰̟O̞̬͚̻̞̹̪̳ͅF͚͓̤͓͕̱͖😂̦̟̣̖͇̦͕̞M͍̬͚̠̪̙Y̖̮̟̜̗̻̺😂̪H̬̝̬̼̫̺̗̦E͈̱A͈̗̜͚̭̱͇̙ͅD̳̻

• Hey👋 ladies💁‍♀️ 📷 Would 😍 you 👈 like 👍 to 2️⃣ get 😮 rich 💰💰💰 by running 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️ your 👈 own business 👩‍💼💼 from home 🏡 with just ☝ your phone? 📱🤳 Well 🤷‍♀️ you can’t. 😂 Get 👏 a 👏 real 👏 job 👏
• Jeff Bezos has 121 BILLION dollars. The population of earth is 7 billion people. He could give every person 1 BILLION dollars and end poverty, and he would still have 114 billion dollars left over but he would do it. This is what capitalist greed looks like!
• I 👆 don’t 🙅‍♂️ want your snapchat 👻 I want 👅 💦 you 😍 to snap 🙇‍♂️ my neck 💀🤠👌
• My fellow Americans, due to the overwhelming amount of black squares teenage girls are posting on Instagram, the supreme court has decided to end racism completely. We did not think you would go to such extreme measures but you have very much proved your point. The military will be told to stand down. Thank you.
• If you ask Rick Astley for a copy of the movie “UP”, he cannot give you it as he can never give you up. But, by doing that, he is letting you down, and thus, is creating something known as the Astley Paradox.
• Give it up folks, einstein over here has something to say. What’s that buddy? Wha- A grammatical error?!? WHAT?!? B… Bu… That can’t be possible! Surely not! A GRAMMAR MISTAKE? IN MY SIGHT?!? What a great, absolute miracle that you and your 257 IQ Brain were here to correct it! Thank you! Have my gratitude, Actually, What’s your cash app? I’d like to give you 20$… Know what? While we’re at it have the keys to my car. Actually, no, scratch that. Have the keys to my house, go watch my kids grow up. Also, my Paypal username and password are Ilikesmartazzes4 and 968386329. Go have fun. Thank you for your work.
• I’m Blue – da ba dee da ba dye, da ba dee da ba dye Da ba dee da ba dye, da ba dee da ba dye Da ba dee da ba dye, da ba dee da ba dye Da ba dee da ba dye
• Stop 🛑 making 🛑 copypastas 🛑 like 🛑 this 🛑 it’s 🛑 low 🛑 effort 🛑 and 🛑 annoying
• Ok. I like you, because of your personality. Sure, people just think of you not as a woman, but I do. They judge books by their cover too much. They never tried to talk to you or anything, did they. They just thought “oh my, this girl’s weird. I’m not gonna talk to her; she sounds like a man”. Is that what they think about you?
• The FitnessGram™ Pacer Test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The running speed starts slowly, but gets faster each minute after you hear this signal. [beep] A single lap should be completed each time you hear this sound. [ding] Remember to run in a straight line, and run as long as possible. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over. The test will begin on the word start. On your mark, get ready, start.
• On the 😳outside 😂I skrrt😤💯 skrrt 🅱️ut ☝️😳on the inside 🥺I hurt 😔😥hurt 😥💦
• I’m Rick Harrison, and this is my pawn shop. I work here with my old man and my son, Big Hoss. Everything in here has a story and a price. One thing I’ve learned after 21 years – you never know WHAT is gonna come through that door.
• Let’s say, hypothetically, I am a barbie girl. Okay let’s even say I’m in a barbie world. Right so, in this scenario, I would obviously know from personal experience that life in plastic is fantastic. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume you could brush my hair and undress me literally everywhere? Imagination; you can derive from the fundamentals of basic logic that life is your creation.
• Like the word ばか that means idiot in japanese, but the wannabe Japanese idiots will always try to type those words in the romaji, they type “baka”. I hate it when people do that, stop trying to talk japanese if you don’t even know it.
• I must give you my greatest apology. I never meant it to go this far. When I started these shenanigans, I imagined nothing of such a serious matter. I didn’t mean to harm your dignity, respect, or honor. But, now that’s it’s gone this far, I can only do one thing; apologize. So, from the bottom of my intellect, family, pride, and dogs, I give you my strongest and hardiest apology. I hope you could forgive me one day.

• ɴᴏᴡ ᴘʟᴀʏɪɴɢ: Who asked (Feat: No one) ───────────⚪────── ◄◄⠀▐▐ ⠀►► 5:12/ 7:𝟻𝟼 ───○ 🔊⠀ ᴴᴰ ⚙️
• Musk poured $44 billion into Twitter. The global population is 8 billion people. He could have given $5 billion to each individual and still had money left over. Most people’s lives would be changed if they received a $5 billion check. But he squandered it all on Twitter.
• I just punched a hole in my wall. I’m in tears. I’m not joking I’m actually freaking out right now. I feel like this is the angriest I’ve been in my life. I’m praying right now that this last year is a dream I’ll wake up from. Is there a way we can sue Naughty Dog for false advertising and maybe even vandalism of a work of art?
• If a service dog without a person approaches you, it means the person is down and in need of help. Follow the dog and you’ll get a free purse or wallet.
• T-pose! Sorry, I was just asserting my dominance… So you’re new here, right? Heh, I’ve noticed you’re a bit small there, you’re a little bit of a quiet potato. Me, I’m a big Chungus as you can see. Yeah, I’m in the band, uh, I play the trumpet. Yeah and maybe a little bit of trombone, y’know? If I’m feeling it, yeah? Do you go on Reddit? Do you like Rick and Morty? Me too! Do you watch callmecarson?
• A few years ago, we would never have supported [minority group], but now that it’s publicly acceptable and profitable to do so, we love you! Back when [minority group]’s rights weren’t socially accepted, we never would have hired or supported you, but now we love you! Our brand totally really pinky promise to care about you, and 100% aren’t a soulless corporation trying to make a profit from your social movement. Remember to buy our products, as much as you possibly can, in order to support us!
• I’m so sick of all these people who think they’re gamers. No, you’re not. Most of you are not even close to being gamers. I see these people saying “I put well over 100hrs in this game and it’s great!” That’s nothing, most of us can easily put 300+ in all of our games. I see people who only have the Nintendo switch and claim to be gamers. Come talk to me when you pick up a PS4 controller then we’ll be friends.
• Writing’s not easy. That’s why Grammarly can help. This sentence is grammatically correct, but it’s wordy, and hard to read. It undermines the writer’s message and the word choice is bland. Grammarly’s cutting edge technology helps you craft compelling, understandable writing that makes an impact on your reader. Much better. Are you ready to give it a try? Installation is simple and free. Visit Grammarly.com today!

• Hello, my name is Mohammed bin Salman the prince of Saudi Arabia who lives in palace on Mirage. The past few weeks some homeless person has been coming into my house and sitting on my couch. He told me his name was “Jame” and he was “saving.” Can someone tell me what this means?
• Hi PGL, it’s me, your only viewer. For months I have created the illusion that you are streaming to a large audience. But here’s the truth: all these people in the chat are me. And now, for you to be convinced of this, I will send this message from all my accounts.
• OCEAN MAN 🌊 😍 Take me by the hand ✋ lead me to the land that you understand 🙌 🌊 OCEAN MAN 🌊 😍 The voyage 🚲 to the corner of the 🌎 globe is a real trip 👌 🌊 OCEAN MAN 🌊 😍 The crust of a tan man 👳 imbibed by the sand 👍 Soaking up the 💦 thirst of the land 💯
• Hello future pros, here’s another tip for y’all out there. You can hide Twitch chat for an instant increase in IQ and for a better viewing experience! Good luck and have fun!
• Hello my name is Jane, I live in Overpass, recently I was gardening some tomato plants, but random people have been ruining my gardening recently by shooting and detonating C4. In the process I lost all my plants and I am struggling finanicially please help me rebuild my garden.
• Hello, Twitch chatter. In case you couldn’t smell me through the screen, I am a player of the game Valorant. Can you explain what is currently happening? The lack of magical Asian people and awful mechanics is making it hard to learn.
• Please DO NOT buy the BTS meal if you don’t stan them. You’re preventing the actual BTS fans who have waited for months from having the BTS meal experience. Eating the sauces without understanding their significance is literally cultural appropriation and it’s not okay.
• Babe, I’m breaking up with you. it’s not you, you were poggers. It’s me, I’m omegalul. I’m sorry if this is pepehands but it has to be done, I’ve just been feeling pepega and our relationship has been weirdchamp for months, it’s time to end it, no kappa.
• Copypasta jokes are not funny. It’s annoying and incredibly irritating to me when I say something in chat because I would enjoy actual responses and I instead get my own words thrown back at me. Please don’t just copy my messages and be original! Thank you!
• My female friend was crying about how fat she was and I was trying to comfort her by telling her that she didn’t look that fat but she kept accusing me of lying to make her feel bad so I thought that saying “maybe your just a heckin chonker” would cheer her up and lighten the mood but she just looked at me and left. I hope she realized that I was only being nice and that she is being irrational.
• A NUCLEAR REACTOR HAS EXPLODED IN LEGO CITY. START THE EMERGENCY HELICOPTERS. HEY. BUILD THE HELICOPTERS, THROW BORON INTO THE REACTOR AND STOP THE DISASTER. THE NEW CHORNOBYL COLLECTION FROM LEGO CITY.
• Hang on guys, I need to sneeze😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😳🤧 ‘scuse me.
•  So here I was enjoying my favorite food (pizza) and watching your stream having a good time when it started to taste funny. It turns out you were being super salty and now have ruined my pizza. Are you going to pay for another pizza or will I have to call the cops? This is serious.
• TSM aka “Truly Somewhat Mediocre” is a North American team that consistently underperforms in all international tournaments. It is specifically known for having a weak early, mid, and late-game.
• ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 CUTE CHAT ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 CUTE CHAT ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 CUTE CHAT ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 CUTE CHAT ✌️ AYAYA 🌸 ✌️ AYAYA 🌸

Copypastas are not for everyone as some people find them annoying.

It’s not surprising because they can take over an entire Twitch chat.

The copypastas in this list were taken all around the internet.

This includes Reddit, Twitch, Discord, Twitter, and more.

If you found a copypasta that you like, feel free to copy and paste it.

Anyhow, the purpose of a copypasta is for it to spread like wildfire.

Further reading

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About the author.

Lim How Wei

Lim How Wei is the founder of followchain.org, with 8+ years of experience in Social Media Marketing and 4+ years of experience as an active investor in stocks and cryptocurrencies. He has researched, tested, and written thousands of articles ranging from social media platforms to messaging apps.

Lim has been quoted and referenced by major publications and media companies like WikiHow, Fast Company, HuffPost, Vice, New York Post, The Conversation, and many others. One of his articles about the gig economy was quoted by Joe Rogan who hosts The Joe Rogan Experience (arguably the most popular podcast in the world), in the This Past Weekend podcast by Theo Von.

In his free time, Lim plays multiple games like Genshin Impact, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Hearthstone, RuneScape, and many others. He creates guides, walkthroughs, solutions, and more on games that he plays to help other players with their progression.

How-To Geek

What is copypasta, quick links, a text-based meme, copypastas and snowclones, he boomed me: a case study, popular copypastas.

Have you ever seen a random block of text online that made absolutely no sense? It may have been a copypasta: a unique type of internet meme. Let's take a look at where this tasty-sounding term originates and an example of what one looks like.

When most people think of memes, they think of images, GIFs , or short videos. Memes are instantly recognizable online, with pictures and voice clips that creep into mainstream pop culture. However, aside from images and videos, memes can also take the form of text blocks, which are known as "copypastas."

Copypastas are named after the act of copying and pasting text. People on the internet share these text-based memes by copying and pasting them all over the web, unlike images and videos, which must be uploaded separately. Similar to memes, copypastas are funny, contain a specific reference to something on the internet, and you can edit them to fit various scenarios.

Like image and video memes, copypastas can take on a variety of forms

• Single-line sentences, roughly the length of a tweet
• Extremely long chunks of disruptive, potentially spammy text
• Long fictional stories with surprise endings
• ASCII art , a graphical format that uses text characters to create images
• Funny tweets and social media posts taken out of their original context

Individual copypastas can come from nearly anywhere. Some of the biggest copypastas are Greentexts: short, personal stories from the image forum 4Chan. While copypastas originate from a specific community, such as a Twitter fandom , 4Chan, or a subreddit , they tend to spread far beyond the reaches of that group.

Related: What Is a GIF, and How Do You Use Them?

One of the most significant subsets of copypastas are "snowclones," also called phrasal templates. These are essentially the modern internet version of mad-libs, with names, places, and objects that are easy to replace based on the context.

The biggest factor behind the "memeability" of a copypasta is how easy it is to edit based on the context, similar to image meme templates. A copypasta is even easier to adapt than image macros in many ways. Instead of going into an image editor and adding captions or editing faces, all you have to do to edit a copypasta is change some words around.

Reddit is especially popular for snowclones because most discussion is centered around text posts. These make the platform ripe for derivations of the same phrases.

The NBA subreddit r/nba is one of the biggest producers of snowclones, such as the "He boomed me" meme. This particular copypasta comes from a tweet by NBA reporter Ben Rohrbach after a 2018 Conference Finals game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics. He says he overheard Lebron James rant about Celtics forward Jayson Tatum, saying that Tatum "boomed him" -- referring to a play where Tatum dunked over James.

After the tweet, user u/FeversMirrors made a thread on r/nba with over 11,000 upvotes . In the thread, user u/Falconpwn6 posted, "I can already tell this is gonna be a copypasta." It became one of the biggest memes on the NBA subreddit, partly because it was easy to modify.

People have replaced various parts of the tweet in random threads on Reddit, both in and out of the NBA subreddit. For example, if you want to describe how you got beaten in an online player vs. player game, you might post:

"He got me," I said of SephirothX's play over me. "That f***ing SephirothX boomed me." I added, "He's so good," repeating it four times.

You might be having trouble visualizing what exactly a copypasta looks like. So here are a few of the most famous copypastas on the internet that you've likely come across at least once, either in their original format or as an edited snowclone.

One of the biggest copypastas online is " This is so sad, Alexa play Despacito ." It refers to a humorous fictional conversation between a user and their digital assistant. This copypasta was started on Tumblr and later spread to the rest of the internet. Users often replace "Despacito" with a relevant song to the current conversation. For example, in a Pokemon-themed forum, someone might post, "This is so sad, Alexa play Gotta catch 'em all."

Another variant is creepypastas , short horror stories fueled by internet folklore. Perhaps the most famous creepypasta is Slenderman, a spooky tale of an unusually tall man in a suit. The Slenderman story inspired spin-offs, a hit video game series, and a movie.

Ultimately, there's no actual guideline for what constitutes a copypasta. These are essentially inside jokes on a massive scale -- people in the know will find them funny, while those who are unaware may consider them incomprehensible and annoying. If you're looking to learn more about the world of memes, check out our explainers on what memes are and how they originated.

Related: What Is a Meme (and How Did They Originate)?

What's The 'LeBron Glazing Poem?' The 'Boy Oh Boy, Where Do I Even Begin' Copypasta Explained

LeBron James is at the center of a budding meme trend, based on his most devoted fans who " glaze " him. "LeBron Glazing" has peaked recently, inspiring a copypasta that begins with, " Boy oh boy, where do I even begin? "

Inspired by the viral " You Are My Sunshine " edits, this unhinged copypasta (that adores LeBron James to a ridiculous degree) was started by a seemingly earnest tweet that's since become legendary.

So, where did the copypasta come from and what's the original post? Let's explain.

What's The 'LeBron Glazing' Poem Copypasta?

For your usage, here's the full copypasta to copy and paste:

Boy oh boy where do I even begin. Lebron… honey, my pookie bear. I have loved you ever since I first laid eyes on you. The way you drive into the paint and strike fear into your enemies eyes. Your silky smooth touch around the rim, and that gorgeous jumpshot. I would do anything for you. I wish it were possible to freeze time so I would never have to watch you retire. You had a rough childhood, but you never gave up hope. You are even amazing off the court, you're a great husband and father, sometimes I even call you dad. I forvever dread and weep, thinking of the day you will one day retire. I would sacrifice my own life it were the only thing that could put a smile on your beautiful face. You have given me so much joy, and heartbreak over the years. I remember when you first left clevenland and its like my heart got broken into a million pieces. But a tear still fell from my right eye when I watched you win your first ring in miami, because deep down, my glorious king deserved it. I just wanted you to return home. Then allas, you did, my sweet baby boy came home and I rejoiced. 2015 was a hard year for us baby, but in 2016 you made history happen. You came back from 3-1 and I couldn't believe it. I was crying, bawling even, and I heard my glorious king exclaim these words, "CLEVELAND, THIS IS FOR YOU!" Not only have you changed the game of basketball and the world forever, but you've eternally changed my world. And now you're getting older, but still the goat, my goat. I love you pookie bear, my glorious king, Lebron James. 🥰❤️🫶🏽

Where Did The Copypasta Come From?

The copypasta was originally posted by a Twitter / X user in August of last year . At first glance, it's hard to tell whether or not the admin is being serious. However, if you click on their profile, it does read "Parody Account" in their bio.

How's The LeBron Glazing Poem Being Used In Memes?

The copypasta has resurfaced en masse because of the recent "You Are My Sunshine" trend that sets a blown-out photo of the famous NBA player to an acapella version of the famous lullaby. The meme has gotten creepy too, as the dichotomy of LeBonBon and LeEvil James has spawned from the mass.

On the original video that started the "You Are My Sunshine" trend, the top comment reads a version of the copypasta which led to its usage on TikTok this week. For instance, a lot of meme creators are using AI-generated voices which recite the poem in a very " within cells " kind of way.

@lw2.orangechicken Boy oh boy where do I even begin. Lebron… honey, my pookie bear. I have loved you ever since I first laid eyes on you. The way you drive into the paint and strike fear into your enemies eyes. Your silky smooth touch around the rim, and that gorgeous jumpshot. I would do anything for you. I wish it were possible to freeze time so l would never have to watch you retire. You had a rough childhood, but you never gave up hope. You are even amazing off the court, you're a great husband and father, sometimes I even call you dad. I forever dread and weep, thinking of the day you will one day retire. I would sacrifice my own life it were the only thing that could put a smile on your beautiful face. You have given me so much joy, and heartbreak over the years. I remember when you first left cleveland and its like my heart got broken into a million pieces. But a tear still fell from my right eye when I watched you win your first ring in miami, because deep down, my glorious king deserved it. I just wanted you to return home. Then alas, you did, my sweet baby boy came home and I rejoiced. 2015 was a hard year for us baby, but in 2016 you made history happen. You came back from 3-1 and I couldn't believe it. I was crying, bawling even, and I heard my glorious king FOR YOU!" Not only have you changed the game of basketball and the world forever, but you've eternally changed my world. And now you're getting older, but still the goat, my goat. I love you pookie bear, my glorious king LeGoatJames!😩🥰❤️💓💗 #bron #lebron #bronbron #bronnie #legoatjames #lebron ♬ original sound – lw2.orangechicken

@exveyyy_ Where do i even begin to describe my lebon bon #lebron #fyp #humor ♬ original sound – ひ Ex ひ

For the full history of the "LeBron Glazing" poem, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's entry for even more information.

Related Memes 7 total

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Twitch copypasta and memes: How to cheer for your favorite esports teams

The simple art of esports copypasta.

It’s the world championship and chat is going hard with walls of text and emotes, often referred to as Twitch copypastas.

No, Twitch chat isn’t being spammed by bots. They are real people.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Twitch chat where memes run free and copypasta is law. It’s fun, free, and most importantly, tickles your feelers.

What is a meme?

Memes are expressions of online culture, such as a belief, a story, or a moment that can be shared in many forms including images, text, and videos.

What is Twitch copypasta?

A type of meme, copypasta is a wall of text made with the intent of being spammed to evoke some kind of reaction.

The text can be an entire essay or a spammed phrase.

People who encounter copypasta for the first time will typically find it annoying because of the constant spam. What makes copypastas fun however, is how easy they can be repurposed and recycled to accommodate all kinds of memes.

For example, Dota 2’s Twitch copypastas are usually elaborately made stories and/or scenarios featuring pro players or talent. The really good ones will have you hooked the moment you start reading them.

How do I use Twitch copypasta and memes in chat whilst watching a tournament?

Lucky for you, Twitch chat is not a science!

There’s no real right or wrong way to meme, but the easiest way to get started is to pick Twitch copypasta and memes that reflect what’s going on in the stream.

Is your favorite Dota 2 team winning? Cheer them on with encouraging copypasta like this:

• peepoClap GO peepoClap PSG.LGD peepoClap GO peepoClap PSG.LGD peepoClap GO peepoClap PSG.LGD peepoClap

Are they struggling to keep up with the competition? Create a funny story for one of your team’s players!

• NothingToSay is a fantastic Dota 2 player, just needs to work on positioning, communication, map awareness, laning, vision control, csing, poking, landing skillshots, objective control, early game, mid game, late game, ganking, and getting kills.

The whole point of memes is to have fun!

Discover a new world of copypasta and memes with the BTTV extension

On top of Twitch’s default chat emotes, hardcore Twitch chatters use additional emotes from a Twitch extension called BetterTTV .

What makes BTTV so good is that users gain access to a huge list of user submitted emotes for free. Without the BetterTTV extension, chatters can only use Twitch’s universal emotes and emotes from Twitch channels users are subscribed to.

To get the full Twitch chat experience during The International for example, I highly recommend downloading the BTTV extension. It really is a whole new world.

• Top 3 snacks to munch on
• The drop in Twitch’s video quality in South Korea might just be the beginning

Basic Twitch and BTTV emotes to start with

(Note: Capitalization is important for inputting emotes in Twitch chat)

Cameraman misses the esports action

Funny moments or major fails

Something goes horribly wrong

• NotLikeThis

A surprising moment

A boring game

• ResidentSleeper

Examples of the best Twitch copypastas and memes to use for Dota 2

• If Puppey has a million fans I am one of them. If Puppey has ten fans I am one of them. If Puppey has only one fan, that is me. If Puppey has no fans, that means I am no longer on earth. If the world is against Puppey, I am against the world.

• :sunflower: SPAM :sunflower: THIS :sunflower: FLOWER :sunflower: TO :sunflower: GIVE :sunflower: OG :sunflower: POWER :sunflower: #DreamOG :sunflower:
• Who is ARTEEZY? ???????????????????? in math: my solution ➗???? in history: my KING ???????? in art: my canvas ???????? in science: my oxygen ???????? in geography: my world ????????
• My name Artour Babaev. Sorry bad englandsky. I grow up in small farm to have make potatos. Father say “Arthour, potato harvest is bad. Need you to have play professional DOTO2 in Amerikanski for make money for head-scarf for babushka.” I bring honor to komrade and babushka. Plz no copy pasteschniko .

• HeyGuys FNATIC HATERS HeyGuys FNATIC HATERS HeyGuys FNATIC HATERS HeyGuys

? #SingaporeMajor @invgaming pic.twitter.com/YMzyRTa9Tc — ONE Esports (@ONEEsports) April 4, 2021

• T1 BETTORS monkaS nymnCorn T1 BETTORS monkaS nymnCorn T1 BETTORS monkaS nymnCorn

READ MORE: Fans are convinced iNSaNiA is a League of Legends player — here’s why

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105 Funny, Witty, & Random Things to Text Your Friends

Last Updated: March 21, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Bailey Cho . Bailey Cho is an Editing Fellow at wikiHow, based in Dallas, TX. She has over 2 years of editorial experience, with work published in student journals and lifestyle publications. Bailey graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Advertising and a Minor in Business. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 106,399 times. Learn more...

Looking for a funny and random message to spice up your text conversation? We’ve got you covered! Engaging in a silly exchange is one of the best ways to bond with your friends, and in this article, we’ve compiled the ultimate list of texts you can use to revive a dying conversation and get the laughs going. From witty and weird to thought-provoking and relatable, here’s everything you need to maintain an entertaining discussion with your besties.

• I gotta finish laundry.
• I’m going to the bathroom.
• I gotta clean my closet after lunch.
• I’m going to make chicken for dinner.
• I have to go to the meeting in an hour.

• Liquid ham.
• Elbow rage.
• Plaid bananas.
• Cockroach patrol.
• Pineapple marriage.

• Do nothing. It is impossible.
• You smell like pasta. Stand back!
• I’m out of my mind. Be back in 5 minutes.
• If history repeats itself, I’m getting a dinosaur pet.
• Everything is coming to you, but you’re in the wrong lane.

Thought-provoking

• Is it possible to cry underwater?
• Is cereal soup? Why or why not?
• Does a straw have one hole or two?
• Why do our feet smell and noses run?
• If animals could talk, which would be the rudest?

• Do you ever accidentally eat a whole pint of ice cream?
• Do you ever bring a book everywhere you go but never read it?
• Do you ever get the random urge to spend $30-50 for no reason?
• Do you ever carry 30 bags of groceries at once instead of taking multiple trips?
• Do you ever get a random flashback from middle school and stay up all night thinking about it?

• If you can’t laugh at yourself, I can help you out.
• I respect the opinion of everyone who agrees with me.
• If nothing is impossible, I’ve been doing the impossible for years.
• Don’t beat yourself up. A new beginning is only a new chance for failure.
• My parents told me to follow my dreams, so I turned to the side and kept sleeping.

• You’re berry important to me🍓
• I know this might sound cheesy, but you’re legen-dairy🧀🥛🐄
• I carrot imagine life without you🥕 Lettuce be friends forever🥬
• I’m rooting for you🥕🧅👩‍🌾🥔🫶
• Thanks for always being there for me. I love you to my core🍎😋

• Did you know? Lemons float, but limes sink.
• Did you know? Armadillo shells are bulletproof.
• Did you know? Cats have fewer toes on their back paws.
• Did you know? The longest English word is 189,819 letters long.
• Did you know? Blue whales eat half a million calories in one mouthful.

Unpopular Opinions

• Chapstick is a scam.
• Android is better than Apple.
• Ketchup is the worst condiment.
• Pizza is an open-faced sandwich.
• Nickelback is the best band of all time.

• Where would bears be without bees? Ears.
• What’s red and bad for your teeth? A brick.
• What is Forrest Gump’s password? 1forrest1.
• What do you call a sad strawberry? A blue berry.
• Where do polar bears keep their money? In a snowbank.

Prank Messages

• Hey, I’m outside the hospital. Which entrance should I pick you up at?
• Dr. Kim? My dog won’t eat or drink anything. Can I schedule an appointment with you?
• Congratulations, you just won the Powerball! You need to provide me with your name, number, address, and social security number to claim your prize.
• Thanks for signing up for the Spongebob Squarepants fan club! We’ll send you updates on what’s happening in the Bikini Bottom every hour. To opt out of these messages, reply STOP.
• My name is Dan Johnson, and I wanted to let you know that I came to your restaurant last night and got food poisoning. I threw up all over my couch, and I would like you to pay for a new one.

• I need a 6-month vacation, twice a year.
• The first 5 days of the week are the hardest.
• After Tuesday, even the calendar says WTF.
• We need to invent a day between Saturday and Sunday.
• My new favorite day is Tuesday because it’s the furthest from next Monday.

• I don't have enough brain cells to go to school tomorrow.
• If I got a penny every time someone asked me my major, I’d be rich.
• Group assignments helped me understand why Batman works alone.
• Every time I see the word “explain” on an exam, I die a little bit inside.
• If TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram were school subjects, I would have a 4.0.

• I’m on a seafood diet. I see food, and I eat it.
• Friends buy you lunch. Best friends eat your lunch.
• If it’s true that you are what you eat, I’m a chocolate cake.
• You know what they say…a hamburger a day keeps the doctor away.
• I decided to start my journey of self-improvement but ended up at the fridge🤦

• I’m enrolling in sugar baby 101.
• Do you want to know the secret to getting rich? Me too.
• If money doesn’t buy happiness, I want to be sad and rich.
• I know they say that money talks, but mine just says “goodbye.”
• My friendship isn’t for sale, but we can discuss a short-term rental.

• Love is really blind because it can’t see me at all.
• The secret to a good relationship is not having one.
• Not me curving any guy that I make eye contact with.
• Do I have a date this Valentine’s Day? Yes, his name is February 14th.
• My life is like a romantic comedy except there’s no romance, and it’s just me laughing at my own jokes.

Song Lyrics

• Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
• If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go…
• This one is for the boys with the booming system…
• Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me…
• Everybody makes mistakes… Everybody has those days….

In a Group Chat

• Don’t talk to me ever again.
• I bid you all a fond farewell.
• Is this why fate brought us all together?
• You guys have no idea what you’ve done!

When They Don’t Text Back

• I really hope you’re writing me an essay🙄
• Hey, I lost my phone. Can you call it for me?
• My last text must have really left you speechless🤩
• I guess you took a trip to Mars last week. How were things?
• OMG, can you slow down? Your replies are so fast, I can’t keep up.

For Their Birthday

• Congrats, you’re not dead yet!
• I hope you have a gouda birthday.
• Happy birthday! Only 55 more years till retirement!!
• Here’s to another year of questionable life decisions!
• Older? For sure. Wiser? Not that much. Happy birthday bro!

To Your Crush

• Do you work at Starbucks? Because I like you a latte.
• If you were a song, you’d be the best track on the album.
• I’d say bless you, but it looks like you already have been.
• Hey, you’re pretty, and I’m cute. Together, we’d be pretty cute.
• Are you an electrician? Because you’re definitely lighting up my night.
• When I send your picture to my group chat, which one do you want me to use?

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-three-minute-therapist/202102/8-ways-make-and-maintain-friendship
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-shared-existence/202304/6-conversation-habits-for-more-meaningful-connections
• ↑ https://www.betterup.com/blog/how-to-carry-a-conversation
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/counseling-keys/201603/the-7-rules-for-texting-in-relationships
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-attraction-doctor/201112/break-the-ice-how-talk-girls-and-guys-0

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An entire essay to insult someone.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. I wager you couldn’t empty a boot of excrement were the instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly. You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have to us who think and reason? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed , drooling meatslapper. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are “challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been “right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. You’re an idiot. A moron of the highest order. You’re so stupid it’s a wonder and a pity you can remember to breath. Intelligent ideas bounce off your head as if it were coated with teflon. Creative thoughts take alternate transportation in order to avoid even being in the same state as you. If you had an original thought it would die of loneliness before the hour was out. On an intelligence scale of 1 to 10 (10 corresponding to the highest attainable IQ) you’re rating is so far into negative numbers that one would need to travel into another quantum reality in order to even catch a distant glimpse of it. Your personality is that of a rabid Chihuahua intent on destroying its own tail. Your powers of observation are akin to those of the bird that keeps slamming into the picture window trying to get that other bird it keeps seeing. You are walking, talking proof that you don’t have to be sentient to survive, and that Barnum was thinking of you when he uttered his immortal phrase regarding the birth of a sucker. You are, at varying times, tedious, boring, and even occasionally earth shatteringly hilarious in your idiocy, routinely childish, moronic, pathetic, wretched, disgusting and pitiful. You are wholly without any redeeming social grace or value. If God ever decides to give the planet an enema you’d better run like the wind because anywhere you stand is a suitable place for The Insertion. There is no animal so disgusting, so vile that it deserves comparison to you, for even the lowest, dirtiest, most parasitic member of the animal kingdom fills an ecological niche. You fill no niche. To call you a parasite would be injurious and defamatory to the thousands of honest parasitic species. You are worse than vermin, for vermin do not pretend to be what it is not. You are truly human garbage. You are a fraudulent, lying, predatory charlatan. You are of less worth than a burnt-out light bulb. You will forever live in shame. You have nothing to say, and Godwin’s Law does not apply when writing about you. You are the anti-Midas, for all that you touch becomes valueless and unusable. Mothers gather their children close when you appear. You are an aberration, a corruption, and a boil that needs to be lanced. You are a poison in need of being vomited. You are a tooth so rotten it infects the whole body. You are sperm that should have been captured in a condom and flushed down a toilet. I don’t like you. I don’t like anybody who has as little respect for others as you do. Go away, you swine. You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. Meaningful to no one, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I wretch at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, and the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. You are a waste of flesh. On a good day you’re a halfwit. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, study, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. It just wouldn’t have been “right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libellous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystrophic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, and socially-retarded. Shut up and go away lest you achieve the physical retribution your behaviour merits. Thank you for your kind attention to and expected cooperation in this matter.

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Donald Trump and Megan Mullally performing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, September 2005

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In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place:

Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand.

Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing that cannot be taken away from those who are about to be hanged, the final death-defying assertion of human dignity and freedom. And the hangmen don’t get the jokes. Fascists don’t understand humor.

There is great consolation in these thoughts. Yet is it really true that fascists don’t get humor? Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized. The ghetto humor that Berg recorded was a way of keeping self-pity at bay. But as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it: “A saving in pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure.” Humor, as in Berg’s description, may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun.

Around the time that Berg was writing her diary, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were pointing to the relationship between Nazi rallies and this kind of comedy. The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.

For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)

Hard as it is to understand, especially for those of us who are too terrified to be amused, Trump’s ranting is organized laughter. To understand his continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why is he funny?

This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is “only a joke.” Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that “only a joke” can so easily become “no joke”—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.

This shift has happened in Europe, too. Think of Boris Johnson’s clown act, his deliberately ruffled hair, rumpled clothes, and ludicrous language. Or think of Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian prime minister from the far right since Benito Mussolini, posting on election day in September 2022 a TikTok video of herself holding two large melons ( meloni in Italian) in front of her breasts: fascism as adolescent snigger. It is impossible to think of previous far-right leaders engaging in such public self-mockery. Only in our time is it possible for a politician to create a sense of cultlike authority by using the collusiveness of comedy, the idea that the leader and his followers are united by being in on the joke.

Trump may be a narcissist, but he has a long history of this kind of self-caricature. When he did the Top Ten List on the David Letterman show in 2009, he seemed entirely comfortable delivering with a knowing smirk the top ten “financial tips” written for him, including “When nobody’s watching I go into a 7/11 and stick my head under a soda nozzle”; “Save money by styling your own hair” (pointing to his own improbable coiffure); “Sell North Dakota to the Chinese”; “If all else fails, steal someone’s identity”; and “The fastest way to get rich: marry and divorce me.” This performance, moreover, was the occasion for Trump’s entry into the world of social media. His first ever tweet was: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”

At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Trump dressed in blue overalls and a straw hat and, brandishing a pitchfork, sang the theme song from the 1960s TV comedy Green Acres . Trump is a terrible singer and a worse actor, but he seemed completely unembarrassed on stage. He understood the joke: that Oliver, the fictional character he was impersonating, is a wealthy Manhattanite who moves to rustic Hooterville to run a farm, following his dream of the simple life—an alternative self that was amusing because it was, for Trump, unimaginable. But he may have sensed that there was also a deep cultural resonance. The Apprentice was “reality TV ,” a form in which the actual and the fictional are completely fused.

Green Acres , scenes from which played on a screen behind Trump as he was singing, pioneered this kind of metatelevision. Its debut episode set it up as a supposed documentary presented by a well-known former newscaster. Its characters regularly broke the fourth wall. When Oliver launched into rhapsodic speeches about American rural values, a fife rendition of “Yankee Doodle” would play on the soundtrack, and the other characters would move around in puzzlement trying to figure out where the musician was. Eva Gabor, playing Oliver’s pampered wife, admits on the show that her only real talent is doing impressions of Zsa Zsa Gabor, the actor’s more famous real-life sister.

The critic Armond White wrote in 1985 that “ Green Acres ’ surreal rationale is to capture the moment American gothic turns American comic.” Trump playing Oliver in 2005 may be the moment American comedy turned gothic again. Whoever had the idea of connecting Trump back to Green Acres clearly understood that “Donald Trump” had by then also become a metatelevision character, a real-life failed businessman who impersonated an ultrasuccessful mogul on The Apprentice . And Trump went along with the conceit because he instinctively understood that self-parody was not a threat to his image—it was his image. This connection to Green Acres was reestablished by Trump himself as president of the United States. In December 2018, as he was about to sign the Farm Bill into law, Trump tweeted, “Farm Bill signing in 15 minutes! #Emmys #TBT,” with a clip of himself in the Green Acres spoof. Hooterville and the White House were as one.

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior. The prototype dictators of the far right may have looked absurd to their critics (“Hitler,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor”), but within the community of their followers and the shadow community of their intended victims, their histrionics had to be taken entirely seriously. Trump, on the other hand, retains all his self-aware absurdity even while creating a political persona of immense consequence.

This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank: in the 2016 presidential campaign even liberal outlets like The New York Times took Hillary Clinton’s e-mails far more seriously than Trump’s open stirring of hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. Funny-autocratic functions better in a society like that of the US, where the boundaries of acceptable insult are still shifting and mainstream hate-mongering still has to be light on its feet. It allows racial insults and brazen lies to be issued, as it were, in inverted commas. If you don’t see those invisible quotation marks, you are not smart enough—or you are too deeply infected by the woke mind virus—to be in on the joke. You are not part of the laughing community. The importance of not being earnest is that it defines the boundaries of the tribe. The earnest are the enemy.

The extreme right in America was very quick to understand the potency of “only a joke” in the Internet age. In a 2001 study of three hate speech websites sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, Michael Billig noted that each of them described itself on its home page as a humorous exercise. The largest, called “N…..jokes KKK ” (the ellipsis is mine) carried the disclaimers: “You agree by entering this site, that this type of joke is legal where you live, and you agree that you recognize this site is meant as a joke not to be taken seriously”; “And you agree that this site is a comedy site, not a real racist site”; “We ARE NOT real life racists.”

What does “real life” even mean when Klansmen are not really racist? The power of this “humorous” mode of discourse lies at least partly in the way it blurs the distinctions between the real and the symbolic, and between words and actions. Consider the example of some of the men tried for their alleged parts in a 2020 plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. One of them, Barry Croft, insisted at his trial in 2022 that he was joking most of the time when he posted on Facebook questions like “Which governor is going to end up being dragged off and hung for treason first?” Another, Brandon Caserta, was acquitted in 2022 in part because he successfully pleaded that violent statements he made on Facebook and in secretly recorded meetings of the group were not serious. These included claims that the Second Amendment sanctions the killing of “agents of the government when they become tyrannical.” “I may kill dozens of agents but eventually die in the process,” Caserta wrote on Facebook in May 2020. He later posted that he would beat government agents so hard they would “beg til they couldn’t beg any more because their mouth is so full of blood.”

At Croft’s trial, his defense attorney put it to an FBI witness that a meme Croft posted showing thirty bullets as “30 votes that count” was “A little tongue-in-cheek? A little bit funny?” On the second season of Jon Ronson’s superb podcast series for the BBC , Things Fell Apart , Caserta acknowledges that, on the secret recordings, he is heard to urge his fellow militia members that any lawyers advocating for the Covid vaccine be decapitated in their own homes, speaks of “wanting Zionist banker blood,” and advocates blowing up buildings where the vaccine is manufactured. He nonetheless insists to Ronson:

This isn’t something I’m dead serious about. This is nothing I ever planned. It’s funny, dude! It’s funny! It’s fun to blow stuff up. It’s fun to shoot guns. It’s fun to say ridiculous offensive shit. And if it offends you, so what? I don’t care about your feelings and how you feel about words. Sorry!

The twist of logic here is striking: Caserta equates blowing stuff up and shooting people with saying ridiculous offensive shit. Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (“fight like hell”) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently “no joke” to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently “only a joke” to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.

For those who love Trump, there is something carnivalesque in all of this. In his discussion of “mediaeval laughter” in Rabelais and His World , Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “one might say that it builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” Bakhtin suggested that the

festive liberation of laughter…was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom.

Trump and many of his followers have made this quite literal. They create their own America, their own republic, their own notions of legality, their own church of the leader’s cult, their own state versus what they see as the official state. In this way, extreme polarization becomes a sphere of utopian freedom.

This is the capacious zone in which Trump’s comedy operates, an arena that admits everyone who gets the joke, from those who fantasize about killing tyrants, decapitating lawyers, and torturing government agents to those who just like to blow off steam by listening to their hero saying stuff that riles the woke enemy. It is crucial that in Trump’s delivery there is no shift from mockery to seriousness, no line between entertainment and violence. His singsong tone is generous and flexible, serving equally well for vaudeville and vituperation. In his streams of consciousness, they flow together as complementary currents.

In the recent speeches in which he has upped the ante on openly fascist rhetoric by characterizing his opponents as “vermin” and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” it is notable that his cadence is soft, almost lilting. There is no warning to his audience that these comments are of a different order. They are not even applause lines. By underplaying them, Trump leaves open the fundamental question: Is his mimicking of Hitler’s imagery just another impersonation, all of a piece with the way he does Biden and Haley in funny voices or even with the way he sings the theme song from Green Acres ?

Even when Trump actually goes the whole way and acknowledges that his rhetoric is indeed Hitlerian, as he did in a speech in Iowa after the alarmed reaction of liberals to his previous “poisoning the blood” speech, it is in a passage that jumbles together murderous intent, complaint about the media, and comic acting: “They are destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing…. They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf .” But he makes the “Kampf” funny, puckering his lips and elongating the “pf” so it sounds like a rude noise. He continues: “They said ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’” Then he adds his defense: “in a much different way.” It is the stand-up comedian’s credo: it’s not the jokes, it’s the way you tell ’em. And this is, indeed, true—the difference is in the way he tells it, in a voice whose ambiguous pitch has been perfected over many years of performance.

The knowingness is all. In the speech in Conway, South Carolina, on February 10, in which he openly encouraged Russia to attack “delinquent” members of NATO , this startling statement, with potential world-historical consequences, was preceded by Trump’s metatheatrical riff on the idea of “fun.” What was fun, he told his followers, was the reaction he could provoke just by saying “Barack Hussein Obama”:

Every time I say it, anytime I want to have a little fun…even though the country is going to hell, we have to have a little bit of fun…. Remember Rush Limbaugh, he’d go “Barack Hooosaynn Obama”—I wonder what he was getting at.

He then segued into another commentary on his own well-honed send-up of Joe Biden: “I do the imitation where Biden can’t find his way off the stage…. So I do the imitation—is this fun?—I say this guy can’t put two sentences together…and then I go ‘Watch!’” (He said the word with a comic pout.) “I’ll imitate him. I go like this: ‘Haw!’” Trump hunches his shoulders and extends his arm, in a parody of Biden’s gestures. In this burlesque, Trump is not just mimicking his opponent; he is explicitly reenacting his own previous mocking impersonation, complete with commentary. He is simultaneously speaking, acting, and speaking about his acting.

It is within this “fun” frame that Trump proceeded to insinuate that there is something awry with Nikki Haley’s marriage: “Where’s her husband? Oh he’s away…. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband! Where is he? He’s gone. He knew, he knew.” He and presumably many members of the audience were aware that Michael Haley is currently serving in Djibouti with the South Carolina National Guard. But as part of the show, with the funny voices and the exaggerated gestures, that lurid hint at some mysteriously unmentionable scandal (“He knew, he knew”) is somehow amusing. And then so is Trump’s story about telling an unnamed head of a “big” NATO country that the US would not defend it from invasion and—the punch line—that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” Here Trump is acting in both senses, both ostentatiously performing and exerting a real influence on global politics—but which is which? How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

This shuffling in a typical Trump speech of different levels of seriousness—personal grudges beside grave geopolitics, savage venom mixed with knockabout farce, possible truths rubbing up against outrageous lies—creates a force field of incongruities. Between the looming solidity of Trump’s body and the airy, distracted quality of his words, in which weightless notions fly off before they are fully expressed, he seems at once immovable and in manic flux.

Incongruity has long been seen as one of the conditions of comedy. Francis Hutcheson in Reflections Upon Laughter (1725) noted that it is “this contrast or opposition of ideas of dignity and meanness which is the occasion of laughter.” The supposedly dignified idea of “greatness” is vital to Trump’s presence and rhetoric. But it is inextricably intertwined with the mean, the inconsequential, even the infantile. He is at one moment the grandiose man of destiny and the next a naughty child—an incongruity that can be contained only within an organized laughter in which the juxtaposition of incompatibilities is the essence of fun. This is why Trump’s lapses into pure gibberish—like telling a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9 that the Democrats are planning to “change the name of Pennsylvania” and that, in relation to the marble columns in the hall, it was “incredible how they could [have been built] years ago without the powerful tractors that you have today”—do not make his fans alarmed about his mental acuity. Cognitive dysfunction is not a worry with a man whose métier is cognitive dissonance.

Part of the dissonance is that Trump’s stand-up routine is completely dependent on the idea that he and his audience most despise: political correctness. Like much of the worst of contemporary comedy, Trump both amuses and thrills his audience by telling them that he is saying what he is not allowed to say. “Beautiful women,” he said at the rally in South Carolina after pointing to a group of female superfans in the audience. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore, but I’ll say it…. That usually is the end of a career, but I’ll say it.” There are so many layers to a moment like this: the idea that the woke mob is stopping manly men from complimenting attractive women, a sideways nod toward the “pussygate” tapes that should have ended Trump’s political career but didn’t, a dig at the Me Too movement, a reiteration of Trump’s right to categorize women as “my type” or “not my type,” the power of the leader to lift prohibitions—not just for himself but, in this carnivalesque arena of utopian freedom, for everyone in the audience.

Flirting with the unsayable has long been part of his shtick. If we go all the way back to May 1992 to watch Trump on Letterman’s show, there is a moment when Trump silently mouths the word “shit.” He does this in a way that must have been practiced rather than spontaneous—it takes some skill to form an unspoken word so clearly for a TV audience that everyone immediately understands it. Letterman plays his straight man: “You ain’t that rich, Don, you can’t come on here and say that.” But of course Trump did not “say” it. A sympathetic audience loves a moment like this because it is invited to do the transgressive part in its head. It gets the pleasure of filling in the blank.

Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion. Consider a televised speech Trump gave at the Al Smith Dinner, hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in October 2016, near the end of the presidential campaign. The dinner, held to raise money for Catholic charities, is traditionally the last occasion on which the two main presidential candidates share a stage—Hillary Clinton was also present. Trump deadpanned that he knew he would have a receptive audience because “so many of you in the archdiocese already have a place in your heart for a guy who started out as a carpenter working for his father. I was a carpenter working for my father. True.”

What is the joke here? That Trump is like Jesus Christ. Imagine if Clinton had attempted an equivalent gag. There would have been outrage and uproar: Clinton has insulted all Christians by making a blasphemous comparison between herself and the divine Savior. But the cameras cut to Dolan, a sycophantic supporter of Trump, and showed him laughing heartily. And if the cardinal found it funny, it was funny. It was thus an in-joke. If Clinton had made it, it would be the ultimate out-joke, proof of the Democrats’ contempt for people of faith.

But what is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. Many of those attending Trump rallies now wear T-shirts that proclaim “Jesus Is My Savior. Trump Is My President.” Some of them illustrate the slogan with a picture of an ethereal Christ laying both his hands on Trump’s shoulders. What begins as a risqué quip ends up as a religious icon. There is no line here between sacrilege and devotion, transgressive humor and religious veneration.

Just as Trump’s jokes can become literal, his ugly realities can be bathed in the soothing balm of laughter. Long before he ran for president, he was indulged on the late-night talk shows as the hilarious huckster. In 1987 Letterman tried repeatedly to get Trump to tell him how much money he had, and when he continually evaded the question, Letterman broke the tension with the laugh-line, “You act like you’re running for something.” In December 2005 Conan O’Brien asked him, “You also have an online school? Is that correct?” Trump replied, “Trump University—if you want to learn how to get rich.” The audience howled with laughter, presumably not because they thought he was kidding but because the very words “Trump University” are innately absurd. When he did that Top Ten List on Letterman in 2009, Trump’s comic financial advice included “For tip number four, simply send me $29.95.”

But these jokes came true. Trump wouldn’t say how much he was worth because his net worth was partly fictional. Trump did run for something. Trump University was an innately funny idea that people took seriously enough to enable Trump to rip them off. And Trump does want you to send him $29.95—the first thing you get on Trump’s official website is an insistent demand: “Donate Today.” This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.

March 21, 2024

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

Small Island

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The ambiguous hero of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is a man of science who insists on the primacy of truth and evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist.

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A previous version of this article misstated the date of David Letterman’s 1987 interview with Donald Trump.

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland , was published in the US in 2022. (May 2024)

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Copypasta tag.

Valorant copypastas

An archive of copypastas from riot games's popular game, valorant, formerly known as project a. and just to be clear, in project a, shooting matters. you don’t kill with abilities. abilities create tactical opportunities to take the right shot. characters have abilities that augment their gunplay, instead of fighting directly with their abilities..

This player doesn't even use a monitor

I think it’s safe to say na is a far superior region, valorant fanfic, csgo is a rip off of valorant, i'm better than professional valorant players.

Valorant censorship

My names hiko im a baiter.

i swear, if I hear one more time that you cant counter Viper postplant.

Uninstalling valorant, i’m paying to shoot like wardell not whiffdell, ​​i've seen tenz play, he doesn't even use a monitor, eating chicken wings beside tenz, valorant is not csgo, eu also known as "easily upset".

What the hell are both of these teams doing?

This valorant team is fantastic, they just need to work on, hiko is as cracked as he is jacked (7-11 diapers), if sinatraa and my girl both drowning (valorant), last week i saw wardell while in line at the bank.

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The Baffling Theme of This Year’s Met Gala

By Anna Marks

Opinion Staff Editor

On Monday night, a select group of celebrities and fashion designers mounted the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presenting a litany of costumes for the public to devour. The Met Gala is an annual spectacle of celebrity that raises money for the museum’s Costume Institute , which works to preserve fashion history.

The night’s enduring power can largely be chalked up to the way guests interpret its themed dress code, which changes every year. At its most brilliant, a theme might inspire absurd, campy or daring interpretations by clever designers. At its most exhausting, it inspires famous people to perform vacuous social commentary while attending an event where a ticket reportedly costs as much as $75,000 . In either case, the commentary the theme provokes gives the gala its enduring cultural relevance.

This year’s theme is “The Garden of Time,” based on J.G. Ballard’s dystopian short story about a count who, for a time, prevents a mob from destroying his villa and the works of culture it contains. The story is an allegory warning about the consequences of keeping art out of public view. The most generous reading of the story in the context of the Met Gala is probably that the Costume Institute, by giving art to the masses instead of hiding it away in a place only the wealthy inhabit, averts Ballard’s dystopia.

But there’s also an unfortunate irony in choosing this particular story. Ballard implicitly criticizes the wealthy count’s distance from the public, but the gala essentially celebrates the counts among us.

High culture is available to the public largely because the wealthy, charitably, make it so. But the nature of this gala, with its emphasis on extolling the captivating virtues of celebrity, leaves me wondering whether the event’s organizers misread the story’s critique or were simply blind to it. For a less generous interpretation of the story appears to mock the culture-consuming public.

Consider the greatest threat to the count’s rarefied life: the teeming people, described as struggling laborers and soldiers, who unthinkingly defile his cultural artifacts at the end of the story. Is that how the party’s organizers see the ordinary museum patrons and tourists who will fill the institute’s halls after the cameras are gone?

I hope the organizers simply didn’t think hard enough about the implications of their chosen story. But if they did, they would do well to remember that art, even high fashion, endures because a mass audience witnesses and appends meaning to it.