Failing to fade away
It all started so innocently.
In 2007 somebody had a funny photo. In that photo, a person was clearly doing something in a manner which would not lead to success in their endeavour.
The enterprising person in possession of this photo wrote “FAIL” on it, and posted the photo to the Internet. It was simple. It was clever. The photo (which I don’t remember, exactly, does anybody know what started it all?) was funny. The “FAIL” added something to it, and a meme was born.
In January 2008, failblog was born — it would eventually be sold for a profit several months later.
Three years later, and the meme is still going strong — surfing the Internet, FAIL photos are easily found in many locations. The FAIL blog now has a YouTube channel, and other sites devoted to the meme, such as English FAIL and Daily FAIL have risen. The meme now needs multiple supporting sites.
But why does the popularity endure? Has it not run its course?
Let us take the following example:
When I started to think about writing this blog post, this was the most recent entry at FAILblog. It was titled Wrestling Maneuver Fail. But who is failing? What are they failing at? It is far from clear to me — and probably far from clear to people who know wrestling — who is successful in this photo.
The funny part is that the wrestler on the bottom is holding the penis of the wrestler on the top. The photo is humorous on its own, but good captions are available:
Mom always said, “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Step one: squeeze.
or
Nearly pinned, Johnny used his infamous hand job move.
“FAIL”, however, fails to be witty, funny, or even descriptive. It is, however, the caption. But even when it is descriptive, there are several reasons why it should die out, and soon.
It is both old and uncreative
It seems most likely that FAIL is just a crutch for people who lack the intelligence, patience, or wherewithal to come up with something original. After all, how many times can you hear the same joke before it stops being funny?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but after three years of photos with FAIL written on them filling the tubes of the internet, most people should be well past their saturation point by now. This small corner of the internet would make the bet that when people DO laugh at a FAIL-photograph, it is in spite of the provided caption, and not because of it.
It has escaped into the wilds of the internet
The FAIL has managed to escape the photograph, into the wider Internet. Right now it seems largely confined to Twitter and video, but as a problem at Amazon last year shows, even the BBC can get on board with the juxtaposition of a subject and the word fail.
Video is closely related to photography, of course, and Twitter’s hash tags and character limit make it an ideal breeding ground in which FAIL could escape the “unimaginative, unfunny caption” status it currently holds, and make a break to the wider world.
It is already happening. And only you can help to stem that tide.
… and into the speaking world
That is, if it’s not too late.
A pet peeve of mine — and many others — is when people start to speak in text message or internet speak. Not in an “I less than three you” sort of way, but sounding out the letters LOL instead of either laughing or saying “that’s funny”. I worry that these people have had their brains melted by aliens, and are now trying to pass a word-of-mouth virus through the general population that will also destroy my own.
It certainly feels that way.
The final straw in this is when FAIL enters into the conversation. At least LOL and their like is simply a matter of people being unable to differentiate a chatroom from a conversation — they have communication difficulties, but not necessarily true mental deficiencies. Somebody who is incapable of expressing themselves, and instead bleats out a four letter, one syllable word, “FAIL!”. That person has a real problem.
I have heard it in conversation, sadly.
The time to act is NOW!
So, dear Internet, are you with me? We must stop the FAIL before it goes any further. Stopping it’s spread across additional mediums is simply not enough. We need to stop captioning funny photographs with the same four letters.
Humour should be simple, yes, but it also needs to be creative, original and insightful.
Let us stop the spread of FAIL before it becomes more than a meme. It begins with you.
me and Liz say fail all the time, and there’s nothing (intellectually) wrong with us!
It is too late – it’s like how everyone complained for about four years about people, by which they meant young people, saying ‘like’. Too late!
@Amy
How is it like the use of “like”? The problem with “like” was that it was being used as every other word, making adults unable to decode the speech of children. As such, it was actually pretty cool — a means of talking in code without need for code.
In other words, like any other teenage/childhood slang.
The problem with “fail” is that it is used in place of intelligence or wit. It is meant to be the punchline of a joke, but it’s just a big ball of crap.
Alternatively, it is meant — as in the Amazon Fail thing — to represent a complex situation in which an organisation fails to live up to what is perceived to be its civil responsibilities. In that case, it only makes sense if you already know what’s going on, and is a poor excuse for the exchange of information with those who do not.
If you have used “fail” as a sentence, to express humour or to describe a complex issue, shame on you.
SHAME ON YOU!
Also, meme-based slang grown out of hashtags used by people over the age of 25?
Lame.
I am totally turned on by the way you guys are debating about this. SUCCEED.
I run Daily FAIL Blog and I would like to thank you for writing this post. Although I do believe just writing fail on a pic might make it funny, you do have some pretty good points. I actually might turn the site into a humor site, without focusing too much on FAIL in the future (possibly with a name change as well). FAILBlog.org has decided to trademark the term “fail blog” and could possibly be shutting down all sites with the name fail blog in them. LOL! How much of a fail is that?
At first, I felt disheartened that you would criticize the delightful failblog.org. It’s one of those funny websites that I can rely on for a laugh. Then, I realized you were right, and that really frustrated me – tacking the word ‘Fail’ on a photo doesn’t really do anything to improve the photo, or make it funnier. Finally, I decided that despite this, it’s not the word ‘Fail’ that makes the photo funny – if I laugh at a failblog pic, it’s because it was inherently funny to begin with, and for that, I can forgive them, for collecting a repository of pictures that are good for a brief laugh or moment of gleeful schadenfreude. Of course, it just happens to be that there’s a great deal wrong with me.
@Daily FAIL Blog
You’re welcome! It’s absolutely wonderful that you take criticism so well.
Thank you for building such a catchy, long-lived site and giving us something to talk about.
I think in this case FAIL needs to be understood better: In the above picture someone is failing; these two (presumably) intelligent grown men have chosen an entertainment/profession that has lead to them fondling a man’s penis this is FAIL! … in-fact the comment is probably meant to be applied to the general act of two men, in lycra underwear, rolling around grouping each other and calling it a sport… (I don’t actually believe this but I suspect that’s the opinion of the picture creator).
At this point it’s reached critical mass and exists as the language of the net. In the same way the office has it’s own environment leading to requests like: “can this be actioned by the close of play” (leading to people being ‘actioned’ in the face)
In terms of the net the language runs…
“in teh beginning there was teh ceiling cat, who was full of Epic WIN and he created teh internetz, but there was also teh basement cat, who can haz FAIL”
The meme shall inherit the earth
Also:
hurray, I am still young enough to use meme-based slang. WIN! …innit…
@chris
So, your defense of the photo used is that it allows somebody to couch their homophobia within the context of a cultural norm, thus hiding it from view?
It should be noted that I’m not a fan of workplace jargon, either. Unlike scientific jargon, it is seldom used as technical shorthand expanding language, and instead used to hide ignorance and make simple things sound like complex impenetrable concepts … like those in the scientific jargon that it mimics. Intelligent office workers generally have no need for it, but still have to learn it to understand what everybody else is on about.
The Internet undoubtedly has its own vernacular, FAIL is part of this, and your paragraph makes sense in its own context. But the narrow application of this (funny photos get FAIL attached, which seldom add to the humour, instead of a good caption or none at all), and the broad application of this (Amazon classifies any material featuring homosexuals as “adult”, effectively removing it from their search engine, and the resulting outrage gets couched in the Internet vernacular rather than that of the larger world outside) should be frowned upon, rather than embraced.
Within certain contexts, I can see how FAIL becomes part of the standard Internet vocabulary. It is still just a word, however. Use of said word does not make something funny (or funnier) simply due to its presence on a photograph.
And when the word is meant to convey a nuanced meaning and have impact on a wider population than those that use the EPIC FAIL dialect, the use of FAIL in fact has FAIL itself!
Drats. That should have read “haz FAIL itself!”
I am now extra amused — Google Ads has placed a “Need help with English?” ad on this page …
(totally forgot I commented on this, thus somewhat late to the party)
Firstly: the ‘like’ thing didn’t make it hard for adults to understand children – it just plain annoyed them.
And I don’t think Fail is used in place of intelligence or wit – as if we’d all be cracking exquisite bon mots when someone dropped a plate. It’s the verbal (as necessary on the internet) equivilant of pointing and laughing.
With the #amazonfail being a poor exchange of information – it’s not supposed to be an exchange of information about the issue. It’s supposed to tell everyone what you’re reffering to. The whole *point* is that it isn’t talking about the whole issue. It’s not intended to tell people what the complex situation actually is, it’s intended to enable people to keep track of the conversation about that issue.
@Amy
On Like: There was quite a bit of humour at the time directed at the fact that otherwise intelligent adults had difficulty following teenage dialogue peppered with “like”. I was a teen at the time, and was able to follow along fine, but like most humour, I figure that it was based (at least partially) in fact.
FAIL vs wit: You are making my point — if it’s just “pointing and laughing”, why write it on the photos? The only reason why these photos are widely distributed on the Internet is to point and laugh at them. Captions on funny photos should add to the funny, should they not? Otherwise they are a waste of time.
#amazonfail: I am not speaking of the hashtag used in Twitter, I am referring to the escape of the hashtag into other written and spoken communication. “Did you hear about the amazonfail?” BBC headlines. Essays.
Used in this way, in the present, it causes a large mass of a potential audience to dismiss what is being said before they bother with the content. In the future, people might understand it, but it will likely have given way to the memes of the future — just as teenagers no longer use “like” as every other word.
These things rob the content of the context it deserves. Amazon labeling gay literature as “for adults only” and hiding it in their search engines was not an issue only of interest to young geeks who use hashtags or intersperse their conversations with the word “fail”. It was wider.