Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-It-On by Adam L. Penenberg

Author:Adam L. Penenberg [PENENBERG, ADAM L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2010-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Q. What does NASA stand for?

A. Need Another Seven Astronauts.

As newscasts replayed the explosion on television in an almost endless loop and newspapers, magazines, and radio covered the inevitable investigation, the joke spread fast and furiously. Almost before the spaceship debris hit the water eighteen miles off the coast of Florida, Wall Street bankers, bond traders, and stockbrokers, plugged into near instant communication were yukking it up, sharing it over the phone with colleagues and clients alike. In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis, who sat with four others at a desk with a hundred telephone lines, reported that six people from six points on the globe called with the NASA “need another seven astronauts” line. “If you ever care to see how all the world’s most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk,” he advised. Elizabeth Radin Simons, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, tracked it to a nearby school, where the morning after the tragedy students were entertaining one another with the joke. Federal employees shared it over government phone lines. It made for water cooler chatter at accounting firms and conversation fodder at bars and cafés, at parties and in hair salons.

Naturally this type of viral humor, known as a joke cycle, was not new. In the United States they date back to at least the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when a series of “Little Willie” jokes were all the rage.

Little Willie with his thirst for gore.

Nailed his mommy’s baby to the door.

Following World War II, there were Holocaust jokes, Jesus jokes, and in the 1950s, bizarre family jokes:

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