This work has in so many ways been a personal journey for me as years before the inception of this volume I began a journey of intellectual self-discovery in which the life and work of Du Bois remained a central muse. So intertwined with my personal story, I ask the reader to indulge me as I break from the traditional means of penning a preface and walk you through portions of that journey as I find it necessary in understanding the soul of this work before you.

The 2009–2010 academic year presented interesting turning points in my life. I was a student at Alabama State University at the time, majoring in history and performing disastrously. Many who supervised my novice scholarship expressed that while I was naturally gifted in history and philosophy—a trait I inherited from my grandfather who taught history for over thirty years—I was unfortunately very undisciplined. However, in the fall of 2009, a chance meeting with Dr. Stephen Redmond, the newly installed director of Alabama State University's branch of the Wesley Foundation, set off a series of events that put me on the right course. Redmond had just moved three doors down from me in the same apartment complex. He was a recent graduate of Emory University's Candler School of Theology, receiving the degree Master of Divinity.

I, much like Du Bois throughout his life, had begun to question the historicity of biblical events as well as the historical effects of African people's adoption of this culturally foreign religious faith. However, I was neither informed enough nor intellectually mature enough to provide any serious cultural-historical assessment of the Hebrew religion that could serve to ease my growing discontent with Christian dogma. On the night of our meeting, Redmond was quite welcoming and conceded to my inquiries though, unbeknownst to me at the time, did so in the tradition of a good scholar of biblical apologetics. He would in later years inform me that this was a ruse to shield his own theological standings while at the same time discovering for himself my intellectual potential.

With a slight smirk and wide-eyed gaze, he questioned me on my own thinking about the world, particularly the state of African people within it. This turn in discourse was refreshing, and I began to offer my humble thoughts.

Did Hitler have an opinion about parking in Tel Aviv? In 1945, Tel Aviv was under British rule (a League of Nations mandate, to be precise), and its population barely reached 183,000 in 1946, according to UN estimates. It seems unlikely that parking would have been an issue, at the time. Of course we know that Hitler did not really have an opinion on parking in Tel Aviv, especially not 70 plus years in the future. That's why the idea is funny, in part. Or offensive, depending on who you ask. Depending on who you ask, you will get very different answers as to whether it is funny or even OK to ask the question, what would Hitler's opinion have been? But before we can even try to answer these questions, we need to address the broader issue: Why are we talking about Hitler's opinion about parking in Tel Aviv? Here we need to take a step back.

Goodwin's Law of Nazi Analogies reads, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one” (Goodwin, 1994). Goodwin observed, some 30 plus years ago, that the longer an internet discussion lasted the probability of someone mentioning Hitler as a comparison to someone or something in the discussion increased and so that if the discussion is long enough someone will end up using a Hitler analogy. Thus any sufficiently long discussion of humor on the internet must mention the Hitler Rant parodies.

This chapter therefore discusses some aspects of the meme variously known as Hitler's Rants or Downfall parodies. The anchor text of the meme is the Downfall (Der Untergang) a 2004 film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler. The parodies focus on a scene toward the end of the movie in which Hitler is told that a counter-offensive on which he had pinned his last hopes to turn around the war has failed. Hitler explodes in a bout of rage, and his staff overhears the outburst and is seen reacting to it with apprehension. The parodies are done by adding subtitles but keeping the original German soundtrack. The first parodies appeared in 2005 or 2006 (Know Your Meme and the Hitler Parody Wiki disagree on the matter). However, there is agreement that they originated in Spanish.

The Chuck Norris Facts are a cycle of jokes/memes which revolve around Chuck Norris's invincible, superhuman strength. It can be seen as the latest incarnation of the “tall tale” of the American hero, such as Paul Bunyan, the gigantic oil driller/lumberjack of Western folklore, John Henry, the African-American steel-driver who beat a steam-powered drilling machine, and of course Davy Crockett. However, we will argue, that while the tall tale spirit is still present in the Chuck Norris Facts, a more complex analysis is needed.

Chuck Norris starred in Walker, Texas Ranger a TV series inspired by the film Lone Wolf McQuade, also starring Chuck Norris as a member of the Texas Rangers. The series aired between 1993 and 2001. The series is known for its corniness and its main attraction seems to be that of seeing Chuck Norris/Walker kick criminals in the face. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker,_Texas_Ranger#cite_ref-12). In 2010, then governor Ricky Perry made Chuck Norris an honorary Texas Ranger for bringing “renewed attention to our Ranger corps” (https://www.texastribune.org/2010/12/02/gov-perry-designates-chuck-norris-honorary-ranger/).

A People's History of Chuck Norris Facts

The fundamental ambivalence of the Chuck Norris Facts is evident from the very beginning: in 2004, NBC, the TV network on which the show Late Night with Conan O’Brien aired, acquired the rights to Walker, Texas Ranger. This inspired the Late Night with Conan O’Brien to run a gag in which Conan would play a clip from Walker, Texas Ranger by pulling a “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever” (a comically red and yellow stick). Know Your Meme describes the clips as “comically over-the-top scene[s].” It is clear from Conan's introduction and the laughter from the audience that the intention here is to ridicule the show, not to aggrandize it. The skit continued for a while and Mr. Norris even appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien firing a prop gun at Conan O’Brien.

In 2005, the Vin Diesel movie The Pacifier was released. The premise is that a Navy-SEAL is tasked with protecting five children. The film was not a success. It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 21 percent (see Figure 15.1).

According to Know Your Meme, Something Awful forum member ScootsMagoo started a thread titled “Post Your Vin Diesel Facts.”

This book set out to provide a critical Afrocentric analysis of Du Bois and his career-long engagement with Africa. It largely accounts for Du Bois’ Eurocentric shortcomings and appraises his more Afrocentric positions. Performing this analysis required a fundamental reevaluation of his works under the lens of a number of mechanisms of analysis informed by the Afrocentric paradigm. I contextualized the experiences that shaped Du Bois’ thinking about Africa throughout his life as well as provided commentary on influential events that shaped Du Bois’ philosophy as early as his college years as well as experiences that continued to shape his opinions through the end of his life. Though I engaged with a number of Du Bois’ writings that spanned the breadth of his career, the principal scholarship of Du Bois subject to review was his book The World and Africa.

In this study I have highlighted Du Bois’ Eurocentric approaches to history in regard to African people. The significance of confronting these Eurocentric assertions is the fact that Du Bois is more or less considered the most influential African American intellectual of the twentieth century. Thus, my aim was to provide an analysis that is useful in illustrating the Eurocentric entrapments in regard to Africa and African people that have plagued even our most brilliant intellectuals. With that said, I have also demonstrated that Du Bois underwent an evolution of thought throughout his life which by his twilight years began to reveal early foundations for Afrocentric thought. I have argued that Du Bois’ analysis of African history, and subsequent promotion of Pan-African unity, is limited by his primary use of the racial paradigm juxtaposed to utilizing a cultural paradigm—though he does make some ancillary mention of culture. As such, in The World and Africa, Du Bois often makes superficial and sometimes erroneous claims about what constitutes African identity. However, Du Bois himself in some ways has expressed his discontent with the racial paradigm, and though perhaps he himself wasn't aware, was on the verge of a revolutionary new philosophy in the form of what he describes as Pan-Africa. Du Bois’ speech at the All-African People's Conference in Ghana charged Africans with the mission of unifying culturally.

We started out this book with a question: How has the internet changed humor? We can now answer with a paradox: the more it changes, the more it stays the same. At a deep level, we know that humor is the same across cultures and across times. The grand theories of incongruity, superiority and release capture these universal traits of human nature: we like unexpected, surprising things that make us feel better about ourselves and we like to play, free of the stresses of life. Of course what any of those things mean, for a given culture and a given time, is up for grabs: what specifically is unexpected or what counts as play, for example, are culture-driven constructs. Each culture determines what things are OK to be made fun of and what things are out of bounds.

So, of course, we could have predicted that humor in the abstract sense remains unchanged, but that what our culture in the first two decades of the new millennium finds appropriate as the object of humor has changed. The time has come to review these changes.

The biggest one is probably the emergence of the humorous internet meme. In a sense, of course, humorous memes have always existed (jokes, comedy genres, etc.). What has changed however, is the participatory culture of social media, the advent of the produsers and the blurring of the professional/amateur boundary. When memes, videos, witty tweets, cartoons, music parodies and generally speaking “media content” are produced and immediately disseminated by individuals with no training and sometimes even less talent, the result is a steady stream of content, often devoid of any quality. However, social media resolves the problem of the substandard quality of material by enacting a most effective selection method, that is, by making the one true marker of success, virality, the result of a very large number of individual decisions (each produser has to decide whether to replicate or to remix each individual item they come across).

The second biggest difference is the mainstreaming of cringe humor. The fact that the experience of mirth may be mixed with the experience of embarrassment, be it personal or vicarious, is clearly a defining characteristic of humor in the age of the internet and social media.

When reading a title like “humor theory” most readers’ eyes glaze over. In fact, a common joke is that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: it kills it. Indeed comedians have long known that if you have to explain a joke, it failed. However, we are not here just for fun; we want to get an understanding of what the evolution of humor in the age of the internet means. This goal requires some understanding of how humor works, in general, so that we can then compare how digital or internet humor works. This requires a little knowledge about humor theory. First, we need to distinguish between humor, which is a cognitive (mental) process which causes an emotion (mirth or exhilaration) which may manifest itself in various ways, including laughter, smiling and other bodily or verbal reactions (e.g., the hearer may slap their thighs or may say “that's funny”). Often the reactions are a mix of all the above. Sometimes the hearer may not react positively, either because they fail to identify the humor or because, while they are aware that the speaker intended what they said as funny, they think the intention is inappropriate. The reactions then may be frowning, staring at the speaker, saying “that's not funny,” etc. If both the speaker and the hearer agree that what was said (the text) is funny, then the humor succeeded and the hearer (and the speaker) experience mirth. If they do not agree, the humor failed and one or both of the people in the exchange will not experience mirth and will instead be annoyed, offended or hurt.

Surprisingly, people have pondered the question of why humor is, or may be, funny for millennia. Perhaps we should say “unsurprisingly” if we realize that humans have probably been laughing since they were human given that humor is universal: there are no reports of human groups lacking humor, in one form or another, as we said before. Be that as it may, some of the earliest documented reflections on humor go back to Plato and Aristotle (so as far back as the fourth century BC). Plato claims that humor is a “mixed” feeling because it mixes pain (“envy”) and pleasure. For Plato laughter comes from ridicule and as such it is a negative emotion, which is mixed with the pleasure of amusement.

Sometimes a joke can take a life of its own. This is the tale of Dogecoin, a joke-currency that became worth $80 billion; yes, that is a “b” at the beginning of the word… (Serrels, 2021). The joke currency is probably the most internet-specific, never-heard-before, genre of humor ever. It most certainly was unheard of. Sure, due to hyperinflation some central banks were forced to print banknotes of unlikely values, such as the German 5 billion Marks banknote printed in 1923, by the Weimar Republic. However, there was no humorous intention at all. The Dogecoin instead was started as a joke. There are multiple confirmations of this fact (Kochkodin, 2021; Salzman, 2021). So what exactly is the story?

Dogecoin was started in 2013 by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus. Palmer made a mashup between two memes. The first one was the Doge meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge) which represent a Shiba Inu dog and its inner monologue. An example can be found in Figure 8.1.

Doge (a misspelling for “dog” according to Nani, 2022) memes started around 2012, on Reddit and 4chan. The second meme of the mashup was Bitcoin. On December 8, 2013, Palmer announced Dogecoin (Figure 8.2), on the Bitcoin Forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0). Note how the style of the multicolored snippets of inner monologue is respected, as well as the “doggie” syntax/spelling, reminiscent of LOLCats talk. Bitcoin is a lot harder to explain than the doge meme, so we need to do a little digression here and discuss cryptocurrencies.

Billy Markus saw the announcement on the web page and decided to create a “fun cryptocurrency.” He modified preexisting code, for example replacing “mine” with “dig” (because dogs dig…), but also introducing some technical improvements, such as having more Dogecoins than Bitcoins. The point is that it was not a particularly complex process, and some of it was done, according to Serrels (2021), during Markus's lunch breaks.

Bitcoin: The Cryptocurrency that Started It All

What is a cryptocurrency? Well, what is a currency? A currency was an agreement between a government and people that in exchange for a piece of paper the government would give you a certain amount of gold or other precious metals (e.g., silver, platinum). This was known as the gold standard.

Part 3 of the book addresses multimodal texts, i.e., texts that operate in the linguistic modality (they use language, in other words) and in some other additional modality or modalities. For example, film, video, or graphics are other modalities (visual, auditive, etc.). Gestures are another modality as well, including facial expressions, hand gestures, body stance, and eye gaze. In short, meaning, broadly intended, can be conveyed in many different ways, only some of which are linguistic. Of course in an image or a silent video no language is used and quite simply the linguistic modality is not used, and, as Seinfeld used to say, there's nothing wrong with that.

In particular we will consider in embarrassment comedy (also known as cringe comedy), one of the defining new genres of the digital age, photobombing, the quintessential visual and non-verbal genre, and the video parody. The latter is exemplified by the Hitler rants, an incredibly popular sub-genre, reaction videos, a parody of a music video by German metal band Rammstein done with legos, and the uniquely digital genre of the rant-to-music video, in which someone's rant is set to music.

On 21 June 2015, I walked down the sunny streets of Frankfurt. It was a pleasant day, but I knew that nothing would ever be the same again because my father, Juan José Gutiérrez Cabello, had died at midnight. Scarcely two years later, I lost my mother, Josefa Rodríguez Santana, as well. My father had wanted to die in his village, Bollullos de la Mitación, in the Spanish province of Seville, but my parents’ lives ended in Germany, where they had arrived as Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in the 1960s. Since their passing, I have been inhabited by mourning—embedded in my everyday, mundane activities. In this journey, my eyes have been opened to different articulations of political work, embracing the communal labor of mourning.

This book is the product of an endless, individual and collective, process of mourning. It engages with decolonial mourning by bearing witness to the political grief work of contemporary struggles against migration-coloniality necropolitics. It departs from the mourning for my parents, their histories and struggles in Germany as Gastarbeiter, while it also engages with the struggles against necroborders in Europe; the intersectional feminist movements against feminicide in Central and South America or Abya Yala; the struggles against state and police misogynoir violence of #SayHerName4 in the United States; and the resistance of refugees and migrantized5 people against the coloniality of migration in Germany. Here, in particular, I attend to the intense political grief work of families, relatives and friends who have lost their loved ones in racist attacks from the 1980s until today. I have read blogs, homepages and newsletters; listened to podcasts, webinars and Sound Cloud episodes; and attended—and sometimes organized—gatherings, rallies, political events and lectures. I have paid close attention to how families, relatives and friends articulate, analyze and grapple with their respective experiences of loss. My mourning has been traversed by their grieving practices; their thoughts have nourished my seeing. It is in this entanglement of affect and thought—thinking through feeling, or sentipensar—that I have borne witness to their accounts. Sentipensar has theoretically and methodologically textured my path through the political labor of mourning as the presenting of those lost.

In the late 1940s, the African world was in utter turmoil. Many factors led up to this condition, and most, if not all, stemmed from the adverse effects of the history of European encroachment and colonialism. The European trade of enslaved Africans brought not only cultural instability and foreign ideological immoralities to the African continent but drained it of both valuable human and natural resources. The Portuguese, specifically, ruined the ancient Indian Ocean trade network, while simultaneously opening up the Kongo Kingdom in modern-day Angola to the trade of human bondage that would ensure that over a quarter of Africans taken to the so-called Americas came from its shores.

Further, the ending of the trade by the very same European powers brought even more economic havoc to major kingdoms and territories that had incautiously grown dependent on its resources. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Africa began to be ravaged by colonial forces. Ancient cities like Benin were burned to the ground by the British, the French would subjugate the last of Dahomey's brave warriors, and the mighty Oyo empire under the rule of Adeyemi Alowolodu came completely under the vassal-ship of Britain's Victoria. The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference carved up the African continent and separated people into colonial territories without regard for cultural and political affiliation.

The twentieth century continued this trend. Masses of African people were affected by two large-scale European wars, usually referred to under the misnomers World War I and World War II, in which millions of Africans found themselves to be little more than cannon fodder. Two decades before the second war, a pandemic known as the Spanish Flu infected over a third of the world's population, as well as killing millions of African people on the continent. In the United States, African Americans were far more likely to die from the disease than whites.

A decade before the second war there was a worldwide economic crisis, retroactively referred to as the Great Depression, which greatly affected African peasant farmers and miners, still under the thumb of European trading companies. It is also reported that during the Great Depression, African Americans, already no strangers to hardship, were under such economic duress that nearly 40 percent of the African American population could not support themselves without government assistance.

The job of the humor scholar is to tackle difficult questions, which other scholars shy from. In this chapter, I will address the issue of why is Grumpy Cat funny?

Anthropomorphism

Grumpy Cat, the feline named in the title of this chapter, was an internet celebrity. The actual name of the cat was Tardar Sauce (note the spelling). It lived for seven years (2012–2019), according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumpy_Cat). Grumpy Cat's death was reported by the international press, for example, The NY Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The cat has its own website (https://www.grumpycats.com) where one can buy merchandise with the cat's likeness, such as a calendar (Figure 13.1). By any standards, Grumpy Cat is an internet star, according to Wikipedia, “As of March 5, 2019, Grumpy Cat had 8.3 million total followers on Facebook, 2.4 million followers on Instagram and 1.5 million followers on Twitter.”

Having established that Grumpy Cat is better known than most people, we need to attempt to explicate the source of the animal's fame. Unquestionably its “grumpy” facial expression was the starting point of its fame. Apparently, the grumpy facial expression was the result of an underbite and feline dwarfism (Wikipedia). Be that as it may, it is unquestionable that the cat's expression looks grumpy. Here a possible explanation seems to have prima facie (pun intended) credibility: people recognize the expression of the cat because it matches the facial expression that in humans is associated with bad (grumpy) mood.

Now it is the case that facial expressions in non-human animals exist and have been investigated (see for example a review in Waller & Micheletta, 2013) and in the case of mammals bear remarkable similarity to the facial expressions of humans or are functionally equivalent to them, for example in primates the bared teeth expression is equivalent to the human smile, indicating benevolence.

The fact that some animals may display facial expressions and express emotions and desires that are recognizable to humans is probably the ultimate source of anthropomorphism, that is, attributing human-like characteristics to animals. I am taking the Grumpy Cat–type memes to be the quintessential expression of animal anthropomorphization.

Of course the anthropomorphization and human fascination with cats (and other animals, domestic and not) did not begin with the internet.

E Tū Whānau is a Māori-based movement focusing on positive change through actions that champion and support whānau (families) to thrive in their home and communities. It has been actively promoted in former-refugee and migrant communities whose collective values, practices, traditions and resilience, along with other protective factors, resonate with Māori at a cultural and spiritual level. The Programme of Action for E Tū Whānau is facilitated through the Māori Community Partnerships group of the Ministry of Social Development.

E Tū Whānau promotes and upholds the Indigenous values of aroha (giving with no expectation of return), whanaungatanga (building connection), whakapapa (knowing who you are and where you belong), mana/manaaki (building the mana of others, through nurturing, growing and challenging), kōrero awhi (positive communication and actions) and tikanga (doing things the right way, according to our values). E Tū Whānau is a movement for positive change developed by Māori for Māori, but there is also a growing demand to deliver initiatives like E Tū Whānau in and to migrant communities, especially those of Colour.

Specifically, culture-centred initiatives such as E Tū Whānau are able to respond to challenges arising from migration processes and from specific events that have repeatedly tested the resilience of the people of Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa), most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as after the Ōtautahi Christchurch (hereafter, Ōtautahi) mosque shooting on Friday, 15 March 2019.

Broadly, the decision to leave one's country of birth and homeland is never an easy feat. Migration decisions are often underpinned by push and pull factors such as political instability, lifestyle choices, employment opportunities and educational prospects for their children. For former refugees, the escape from civil wars, human rights violations, religious persecution and displacement are push factors for risk-taking journeys to countries where United Nations protection is sought for resettlement to a safe country. My own whānau (family) had to make a hasty decision to leave Fiji, the country of our birth and homeland for three generations of ancestors who had arrived from Afghanistan, India, Guyana and the Solomon Islands. The execution of the first coup in Fiji in 1987 was the push factor for our whānau's decision to migrate to Aotearoa where strong Fijian diasporic social networks existed.