Rickroll Me Baby, Lemme Meme You All Night (& Other Bouts of Internet Video Humor)

And on the 32nd Day, the Lord said: let there be craziness on the Internet. And so it came to pass. And lo, verily, we duckrolled into rickrolling, which took off like a giant, crazed bat this April Fool's Day.

But before the rickroll, there were the ancient days of meme. Back in the 90's, when Dancing Hamsters and Dancing Jesus were the headliners. Yes, the original dancers, long before The Simpson's derivative art.

It took a long time to find even a small version of the original Dancing Jesus to share with you in this quick-look history of whacky web memes.. So far, we haven't been able to get the music playing, but the spirit is there. Nor have I been able to find the original Dancing Jesus and the Dancing Apostles. It appears they have entered through the door of 404.

But not the Dancing Hamsters. They party on, in various forms. In fact, you can get your groove on and exercise with Hampton and the Hampsters.

The amazing thing about these original memes: they were all just moving .gifs, with music. Oh, those of us who were early webmasters (and webmistresses), we thought that the first time we could insert moving gifs that verily, we had come into manna.

And then came rickrolling. 80's singer Rick Astley has found himself to be a new internet phenomena, albeit in a strange way.



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Rickrolling t even made it unto the New York Mets, where, lo, it was mightily booed.




New York, New York: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Even if the Mets fans did roll over rickroll, the meme barrels on. Millions of Astley videos are still being downloaded, even though April Fool's Day has passed.

But before rickrolling, there was the Macarena. On the internet, macaroni performed the Macarena, now apparently replaced by the Papaya Dance.



Another new epoch in internet fads has dawned as peach and orange-clad Filipino prisoners perform choreographed dances. Although "Thriller" was the original meme hit, you can also see routines set to Sister Act's "I Will Follow Him" to Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major"(with guitar) .