Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes? | Hacker News Reader

Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes?

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63 pointsbenbreen54 comments

My kid was complaining that while some of the cultural touchstones I introduced them to were interesting and enjoyable, I gave them a very unrealistic impression of how often they would find people who understood the references.

I'm hoping that changes when they go to college and meet more alpha nerds. But I became a Monty Python fan, for instance, when it was in its second life, and at the time it felt inevitable that it would have a third. It has aged less well than I thought. The early 70's and early 90's are much closer together philosophically and chronologically than the early 90's and the 20's. Now you're lucky if they have seen the Holy Grail, and nobody gets Parrot Sketch or Lumberjack references. And even switching from Cheese Shop to Wallace And Grommit references is out of date.

As I move into my second decade as an educator (started as a teaching assistant around 2012, now a history professor) it's been really interesting seeing what "sticks" and what doesn't. A couple years back I made a Simpsons reference that I know would've landed with my students from circa 2015, but it was crickets. However I feel like certain movies and other cultural productions from as far back as the 70s are still on students' radar -- like Scorsese films, for instance.

I've got a two year old daughter and as she gets older, I'm tempted to show her old episodes of the PBS show Nova and the original Cosmos so we're on the same cultural wavelength, but I probably shouldn't try to force it. She was born with an illustrated box set of the Lord of the Rings already sitting in her room though ;)

Thanks to the Cape Feare episode of the Simpsons that I watched way back in 1993, I understood references to Scorsese and Gilbert & Sullivan that I couldn't really explain to adults at the time...

I think if you watch whatever the kids are watching, you'll find there are little references here and there to stuff the writers enjoy. These little moments, often non-sequiturs, tend to stick out, maybe because they seem a little out of place.

I've been collecting movies for my Plex server for a few years, and I went through the phase where I was getting all the classic movies, all the Oscar-nominated movies for every calendar year, etc.

And I stumbled on a movie I would never have watched. But in reading the synopsis for it, I recognized a reference I had picked up as a small child from what was either the very late 1970s or maybe early 1980s. For less than a year (I'd imagine), everyone must have been making jokes about "Turkish prisons". The kind of thing that stand up comedias on Carson would have joked about, SNL, etc. And I overheard one of those jokes (or several), filed it away, and never figured it out.

Midnight Express (1978).

It's funny to me, there have been other such instances. Only took me 40-some years to solve.

I only knew the reference from Airplane! A few years after.

Oh, maybe that's where I heard it. I remember what age I first heard it, but couldn't place the reference.

Thanks for sharing this! I also knew the Airplane reference, but assumed it was some kind of non-sequitur or a joke about a Turkish stereotype I was unfamiliar with.

I also had no idea it was a reference to another movie! I thought Turkish prisons were just known for some sexual connotation.

I always wanted to watch the movie, not because of the critical acclaim, not because I want to see graphic prison scenes, but because of the Giorgio Moroder score. The wrestling tag team Midnight Express, Dennis Condrey and Beautiful Bobby Eaton, managed by Jim Cornette used the main theme as their entrance music, and Art Bell used it to introduce his radio program. I figured if these guys, who I was a fan of, were so into it (whether they were actually into the movie, only wanted to piggyback off its success, or just liked the song, I don't actually know), I should check it out. The last straw that made me actually watch it was when my gf happened to live around the corner from an all night diner that we went to a lot named "Midnight Express".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD4Ks_EMQBY

The Midnight Express theme song is pinned on my "strutting" playlist.

It's a great story but if Moroder is your only interest in it, you're probably going to be disappointed (I like crime/thriller/escape movies myself). The song itself plays in an early scene and the rest of the movie is pretty bleak.

The 1982 song "Some People (Have All The Fun)" was a minor hit in Australia, New Zealand. It includes the lyrics:

    A Oh mumma make me happy, send me lots more cash
    Don't worry, I saw the Midnight Express thirty-six times
    And I know where to keep my stash

Young me took a few years to understand the reference.

Completely agree. My kids watch lots of Spongebob, Teen Titans Go, etc and there are so many pop culture references from before their time and before mine even. Reminds me of how much I learned about older things from watching the Simpsons as a teen.

Kids today are growing up in an age where people do not have shared experiences when it comes to media. When I was a kid everybody sat and watched TV every evening, and the next day we would discuss it at school. This no longer happens anymore: everybody is watching on-demand content (or TikTok) and there’s so many different services and so much content that it’s rare that anything breaks through and achieves a critical mass of viewers that allows it to enter the cultural consciousness - Squid Game is a good example of that happening.

This is a very good point. On the literature side, Harry Potter seems to have attained this critical mass, too. One of my daughter's school friends was shocked that she hasn't read it, and lent her the first book. She read it, and when I asked her about it, she said "well, it's kind of ok". Of course, one of the reasons of HP's popularity is that it's not difficult to read - the language is relatively simple, the books are not overly long, etc. OTOH, having recently read LotR, Ursula le Guin's Earthsea and some Sanderson it's no wonder that she found JKR a bit... boring.

As a child of that time the real magic of Harry Potter was that he grew up with you. The books got gradually more mature throughout the sequence, Rowling was writing for her fans as they grew up.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the first full novel that I read. The first books are tame and suitable for young children. By the time the last books came out I was an adolescent and I appreciated the more mature themes.

Then a second slightly later generation had the same experience but with the movies instead of the books.

as an adult, the magical aspect was that this was a series where the books were coming out on a regular cadence, and millions of people were invested in the series while it was still being written. I can think of very few other recent examples of that - the game of thrones books, but they basically stopped coming out, and everything else was either not an ongoing series or had a much more limited audience.

I hope they figure out in their twenties what they've missed and try to fix it. Could see a renaissance in hobby clubs.

This is the outcome of streaming video and algorithms picking things for you. Since there was so little choice, shared culture was something you could rely on. Now that everybody essentially has their own version of the internet, it's much harder to find common ground.

I think this is why image macros spread so easily. Even if you haven't seen the source material you can usually get the meaning from the image itself. If I say to a classroom "no, it's the children who are wrong" very few will get it. Maybe the ones who have seen the image macro before[1]. But if I put it on a slide, then everybody understands.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch

Every year, fewer and fewer co-workers get all my little jokes and references from 90s (and 2000s) movies. Really nails home how old you're getting. I made a silly Pulp Fiction reference in front of a group of developers, and nobody got it. I explained it and one of them said, "Man, that movie came out years before most of us were even born." Wow, arrow to the chest.

Yeah well so did many other great movies for me: Jaws, Godfather, Star Wars, Alien, Its A Wonderful Life, numerous Disney animated features, etc etc but there's many of those that are timeless. But I do imagine as the quantity of content increases it becomes harder for timeless features to break through. Probably doesn't help that the streaming services tend to split the cultural catalog in a way that video stores never had to suffer from.

While I'm no big fan - mostly the nostalgia effect - I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars. I found it hard to imagine.

A few weeks ago I watched "A new hope" with my 13yo daughter, we both loved it. Of course the effects didn't age well, but the story and acting is as strong as it used to be. I'm going to watch "The empire strikes back" with her soon and have to be careful not to spoil the "I am your father" reveal. Though I admit she's not very typical - we're both Whovians ("number one fans", so to speak;-)), so she's accustomed to story, writing and acting being way more important than SFX (which is IMHO the correct attitude, at least most of the time).

I really hope that she'll find some fellow geeks soon.

Also, in my current team at work I used to be the only one who watched (and read) "The Princess Bride". Now one coworker also watched it, and one day we're going to watch it together with the whole team. I think many people nowadays know it only from memes, which is sad - it's a great movie.

In my first job, one guy called me the brute squad cause "I was big like Andre the Giant". I was a huge wrestling fan and never knew about the movie. I rented it that weekend. I'm glad I watched it, ha.

one of my best friends going back to college (we're over 40), has never seen any Star Wars movies and it makes my wonder why we're even friends

years ago, I had a coworker from Pakistan; he liked to watch movies, but it took several Office Space references before he got around to it

> I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars. I found it hard to imagine.

I've never watched Star Wars and I'm mid 30's. The movies just doesn't interest me; as doesn't the Lord of the Rings.

It's not that I'm dismissing them as great movies they just don't hook. I've seen clips and eh'. But I am from Europe, not the US so maybe that's why.

Well, the whole point is, they are so prevalent in pop culture that it's difficult to understand some things/references not knowing these works, at least superficially. It's very much like the list of compulsory books at school - they give the whole generation (even more generations) a common language.

I find that something being prevalent in pop culture means I don't have to watch it; I already know the basics without ever having seen it. Citizen Kane, for example.

That is a great Citizen Kane joke since its greatness is that each shot was carefully planned and storyboarded. The films brilliance is the visuals.

I never gravitated towards the Lord of the Rings books but resolved to read them in college because they were a reference point for so many of my friends. They really rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to force myself through them. A decade later, I greatly enjoyed the movies while watching them with friends but found that they bored me when I watched them alone.

I'm a sucker for Star Wars, though. I'm sad to say I've paid to see some of the newer ones even when I knew better.

Interesting. I love LotR the books, but I dislike the movies a lot - maybe they are good as "standalone" films, but they change so much important stuff from the books that they were a very sore disappointment for me.

interesting, I had just the opposite reaction - I could imagine them being a bit thin-feeling as standalone films, but as illustrations for the books they worked beautifully.

Lord of the Rings has its roots in Norse mythology.

Over 40 and never seen star wars or lord of the rings or probably any marvel movie

I don't think it's because you are from Europe

> I've seen clips and eh'.

I think it's because you've watched clips instead of watching a story, and judging it based upon today's films being so shallow that they can be summed up in a clip.

Not that Starwars is deep, but it's a lot deeper than anything out of the Marvel stable.

> have to be careful not to spoil the "I am your father" reveal

I'd never thought about it before, but the prevalence of star wars in pop culture made it so basically my whole generation had that reveal spoiled in cartoons and different parodies way before any of us actually watched the movie.

Well, she doesn't, and I hope it stays that way until we watch TESB...

I've experienced something similar with my kids where they're at a deep cut level of familiarity with all the StarWars, Indiana Jones trilogy, Marvel, DC, Jurassic Park, etc. from having played the Lego games of all of them.

Lucky you! My ten year old has zero interest in watching the movies I grew up with in the 80s with me. When I had a kid, I started building up this fantasy that one day we'd sit down and go through the movie vault and watch all the classics together, but we tried and she's just not into it. It's a combination of the (to her) immense runtime of a typical movie and the slower pacing of media from decades ago. She got through about 15 minutes of Star Wars and was obviously bored.

I don't force her. She knows the offer is always on the table. "Kids these days!"

I started them on Ghibli at a young age and so they generally trust my recommendations. I've had a couple of bad misses lately though. Old movies I remember fondly that don't hold up. I'm trying to remember to watch them once by myself first before I suggest watching it together, lest I break the spell.

> I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars.

I never really watched Star Wars. I've seen part of it, and it never seemed all that interesting. I know enough to "get" the references, and I'll even make them myself, but I never really cared much for the films. As far as I'm concerned the best Star Wars film is Spaceballs (but I can't seem to find my DVD copy right now, but I'll comb my living room for it later).

I'm not trying to be the "cool kid" or something; I'm just saying there's a lot of variation in what people watch, read, listen to, and generally do with their time.

My grandfather died (in 2008) and he had never eaten pizza in his life.

Just a few weeks ago I introduced a woman in her 50s to chickpeas.

A few years ago I mentioned Stephen Hawking to a group of coworkers (I was the only programmer, working in the sales office) and no one knew who he was. "You know, the scientist in a wheelchair, with a robot voice". Nope, no idea.

But then a few weeks later they mentioned ... someone ... I had no idea who they were on about. Apparently it was someone who was on TV all the time, but not the programmes I watch I guess (I have obviously forgotten who).

The first time I heard about this Kim Kardashian person was with the introduction "you must have been living under a rock if you don't know who the Kardashians are!" Yes, this Patrick.

I can go on and on with people who "have never done X" or "have never seen Y", for all sorts of values of X and Y.

> Yes, this Patrick.

a non trivial number of folks won't get that reference either

I certainly didn't.

That was kind of the joke/point :-) If I had more time and/or creativity I would have edited in more references to various things.

oh boy! 3am!

I recently met a couple in their early 50s who have never seen the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies. These aren’t people who eschew popular movies or don’t like scifi/fantasy. They just… never watched them. If they have never seen them, I can’t imagine how many younger people haven’t seen them.

What we see is another layer of cleanup of older media, where large amounts are culled from the next generation's minds, but some will still remain. The culling first gets rid of chaff, and eventually just leaves the very best examples of old art. You can watch black and white movies on streaming services today, and the average quality is going to be extremely high, as all but the very best has been washed away.

My teenage son and his friends don't just look at current media, but old one too. Kids born in 2010 that just realize there was some great music in the 70s too, and that today decide that some old videogames are still worth playing, while many have aged way too poorly. Some will get remade, maybe badly, and other parts abandoned.

Monty Python's sketches are still funny to them, but the media is relatively low quality, and that style of humor has already been absorbed into the comedy corpus. Something as absurd as the parrot sketch wasn't just funny, but also felt new to many audiences. Today you find absurdity even in something like Rick and Morty, just in faster packages, relying less on repetition to try to elevate the bit. Trying to hammer at the core joke 8 times in a row is out of fashion. Now the repetition comes with longer spacing, or from different directions: See how meme images work.

I know I'm not the only one who does this. You see some weird reference on reddit to an obscure idea. And you see it again on another social media platform just a few hours or days later. And then, you notice it pop up again and again in the coming months. And you get that impression, that the person referencing it subsequently, like yourself, saw the earlier reference.

But it doesn't stop there. A few weeks later a completely independent factoid pops up. Independent though it is, it's related somehow to the other. And you wait and you wait, and someone slaps them together like the world's worst "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" Reese's Cup commercial.

Crudely and imperfectly, you're tracing these memes as they leap from brain to brain. Like an epidemiologist. You can see the outlines of the chains from person to person, even though almost certainly a link here or there is invisible to you.

Just the idea of tracing the memes gives hints at why some live and some die. Certainly ancient Hurrians, whoever in the hell they were, weren't able (for the most part) to craft memes that could survive... little of their ideas were written, and some disaster or conquest ended their civilization. Ours are likely no less ephemeral... the Carrington Event that wipes out my comment history might already be on its way. But some ideas and stories just happen to land on barren soil. The listener finds them boring. Or has many other more important stories they prefer. Or, with our disjointed way of communicating now days, the message in a bottle just winds up on a desolate shore.

What the link's author talks about is somewhat different, I think. He wonders why the crows that collect shiny baubles prefers one shiny rock over another. It's a fashion thing. This story or that idea seems "cooler", it coheres well with the listener's personality, or makes them stand out when they're trying to woo the opposite sex.

> You see some weird reference on reddit to an obscure idea. And you see it again on another social media platform just a few hours or days later. And then, you notice it pop up again and again in the coming months. And you get that impression, that the person referencing it subsequently, like yourself, saw the earlier reference.

Though I agree that sometimes we can trace the spread of memes in this way, a lot of this feeling is attributable to the frequency illusion, aka the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Skepticism is of course healthy... but the frequency illusion thing may not be applicable here.

For the "frequency illusion" to be a valid here, someone somewhere is independently rediscovering the meme, and posting it for friends/strangers/whatever, right?

Where are they coming up with it though? It's not from primary/original researcher. They are seeing or hearing other references to it in their social lives. Even if that happens offline (which I certainly hope still happens), then the person they received the meme from almost certainly got it from one of the sources you yourself noticed earlier.

Now, because of the way the transmission worked, you missed several links in the chain. But you're still seeing the outline of the chain, even if you're missing alot of detail.

Superstitious people think that seeing something everywhere means it popped up because of some supernatural forces or whatever. But I think it pops up because these memes are flowing back and forth between brains, and if you're located in one part of the social graph, you'll continue to see it flowering in proximity to you for hours, weeks, or months.

Yes, I have a very old 4chan archive, starting from 2005. Just taking things as they struck me. Watching various memes surface, evolve, mate, and so on has been interesting.

The Mittani were pretty fascinating in general. The extant writing (including Kikkuli) have many Indo-Aryan loanwords almost identical to the more-or-less contemporaneous Sanskrit [0]. They also seemed to have worshiped many of the same deities. It's possible that they were part of the same original group as the Vedic Sanskrit speakers, migrating out of central Asia in different directions, after significant interaction with the non Indo-European Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex civilization [1].

There were the Hittites and other Indo-European speakers in the area as well, but those were different subfamilies, associated with migrations at different times from different areas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_superstrate_in_Mita...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archa...

The current hypothesis is that the Mitanni rulers were speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, with the populace being Hurrian.

I'd argue that almost every historical figure becomes a meme at some point, even through the lens of many robust historical accounts. We don't usually care about the details of their lives, and that detail is often lost when informally shared...except for the parts that exemplify a few key traits of the individual. As such, over time, that individual begins to embody such traits, even to the point that we use it as a guide for our own efforts and aspirations. And so, as the knowledge of that person is further condensed (and frequently rewritten), they slowly become a meme shadow of the original. Still remembered, but imperfectly, and serving more as an inspiration than someone we directly learn from. US presidents, British royalty, notable inventors, the list goes on.

The funny thing is, we are often shocked a bit when we find out the real person wasn't the literal embodiment of what we thought they were, flaws and all.

FWIW if somewhat tangentially related, there is a subreddit that takes old artwork and memefies them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/trippinthroughtime/top/?sort=top&t=...

The old reverse boycott never fails.

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