Titled, “So Deep,” the post featured a short clip of a still image of a man crying while sitting at a table, possibly intoxicated (the bottles in front of him are ambiguous due to the low quality of the image). A Nine second audio clip of Goyte’s 2011 single “Somebody That You Used to Know” plays a single time. The upper text reads “YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO CUT ME OFF”.
It was the bottom text, “NEKALAKINAHAPPENENAWIWANATIN” that commenters on the post were most enthusiastic about. When simultaneously to hearing the audio clip from the song, each phoneme of the long and nonsensical non-word are clearly audible in the vocal performance. More important than that, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine that Goyte’s pronunciation could consist of actual words. One is left with the distinct conviction that no lyrics are present in this portion of the song. The top response in the post’s comment section made clear the feelings of users. That alone was unusual. Unlike the great majority of Reddit’s 2.8 Million niche-themed subreddit discussion boards, the commentary in this specific distastefully named subreddit doesn’t tend to amount to “discussion” so much as extended riffing on whatever the original post’s joke was. A signal emerged from what is typically pure noise. “I hope there is a sub for this.” In a subreddit users seem to frequent specifically because it lacks structure, a collective call was made for much more humor employing a very specific form of joke with an even more specific structure: Humorous images, captioned with phonetic transcriptions of short clips of audio.A user suggested /r/didnthavetocutmeoff . Other users agreed. A subreddit was registered. Another user would go on to comment /r/birthofasub, linking to another subreddit that seeks to chronicle the creation of subreddits as it happens, presumably for posterity. Users clicked through to /r/didnthavetocutmeoff and joined the sub. All of this was read by more and more users that had checked the comments on the original post. This very particular, very specific framework for jokes-constructed-backwards produced new submissions with surprising rapidity.
Is the joke new? It is not. The website YTMND (launched in 2001) consisted almost entirely of this joke, told at that time with midi files and html code that looped video clips as background images (the embedded video of today had not yet been invented). The misheard, misunderstood, and subsequently mis-performed lyric undoubtably predates song. Certainly, it dates back to poetry. Perhaps even to the oath or the prayer. But it was seemingly new to Reddit. At least the part of Reddit who’s sense of humor still operates on a level in which jokes posted to this specific lewdly named Subreddit. There was something new in the joke for me, though. In the time since I’d been first laughed atincredibly primitive posts along these line
s around 2005, I’ve learned that there’s a subtle difference between hearing a lyric incorrectly that one turns into a joke and suggesting the wrong lyric to someone else and forcing them to mishear it. The former is certainly ancient, but the latter (at least knowing that the latter is possible,) is an example of a psychological phenomenon known as . Hopefully, this new subreddit (which has over 4,000 subscribers as I finish this, about 18 hours later,) will continue to explore that phenomenon, which I am not paid to explain.The author wishes to note that while this post discusses content from a subreddit many would find offensive, he does not frequent the subreddit in question himself. Rather, he encountered the post while browsing Reddit by “/r/All,” an option that allows users to view posts from all subreddits that are currently highly upvoted. He would also like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that while he has been a Reddit user for over 12 years, he has certainly engaged in other activities that did not involve being online.