The Tartan

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

This article is about a very silly YouTube video from six years ago. Oh what’s that? You think I should be writing about politics? Current events? I’m not a Zoltar machine, you can’t just give me a coin and get a hot take. You’re going to have to accept whatever I’ve written this week. This is my magnum opus. Kick rocks or something. 

The aforementioned video unfolds thusly.

A man is sitting alone in his truck with his face toward the camera, indicating that we are watching a short-form comedy video, evocative of a Vine or TikTok. The curtain has risen, and act one begins. This is the anacrusis. This section establishes our cast of characters and our world. The man speaks, to inform us of his recent epiphany. 

“I figured out why city boys don’t drive lifted trucks very much,” he says.

Our prior knowledge tells us that this question should soon be resolved with a punchline — the climax of our story. But instead of this, the man says the word “swaus.” To be absolutely clear, this is a nonsense word. It is not a person’s name, nor a reference to anything. The uncanny timbre of his voice suggests that this video has been doctored, and that our protagonist never actually said the word swaus. You begin to wonder if someone edited the video to make him say things he never said. 

However, we barely get the time to ponder this before the man begins shouting. “EEEAAYYYY,” he says. The video is slowed and the is reverb cranked way up. Surely this is the climax of the piece, no? 

Our expectations are about to be subverted further. This is not the three-act story we expected. The video thus far has merely been the overture to a much longer work. The video changes. Our friend in his lifted truck is gone, the screen now occupied by a claymation turtle singing into a microphone in some foreign language (Farsi, as it would turn out, though, I can’t pretend I knew this at the time). The singing continues, but the turtle video gives way to a black screen. The singing remains. Still images begin to occupy the screen: an aquarium, a skyscraper, a piece of aluminum.

This video is strange and unsettling. As many comments will point out, it feels like this was meant to activate a sleeper agent. One might erroneously say this video is funny because it is random. I disagree. True randomness would be a nonlinear, incoherent assortment of video and audio. This is not random. There is clear evidence of a human mind behind this, an author made deliberate artistic choices to communicate a message to us. So what is that message?

Let’s first get into why I find this video utterly hysterical. This video falls into a unique category of internet memes where, simply put, the joke is that there is no joke. Most memes aren’t really that funny (be honest, how often do you truly laugh out loud at them?). They’re funny because they contain references we understand — a particular joke, a format, an image — something we recognize and go, “hey I get that!”

This meme contains no explicit references, yet a successful interpretation is still predicated on possessing a body of knowledge shared with the author. This is, in a sense, performing the same function as a conventional “reference.” 

To emphasize, I don’t know the man in the video, I don’t know what “swaus” means, and the singing turtle and its words are utterly unfamiliar. How can something have “references” if I don’t recognize anything contained in the video?

To understand this meme, you need such a comprehensive knowledge of internet culture to confidently know that there is in fact no reference to be understood, no joke to be gotten. The author is nodding at us, saying, “we both know this is gibberish, only you and I get that there’s no joke.” Moreover, the video puts me in awe at the creative talent of somebody who can create something so purely original, so utterly without precedent.

I confess, I somewhat lied when I said that “swaus” is meaningless. It evokes a genre of videos known as YouTube poop (or YTP). A YTP video generally involves taking a piece of media (a TV episode, a commercial, a political debate, what have you), and heavily doctoring it for comedic effect. With such a broad definition, patterns and tropes emerge — bass boosting, reverb, visual distortion effects. A common technique involves reversing the video in the middle of a speaker saying a word. For example, if someone were to say the word “swagger” and you reversed it halfway through, it might sound like the word “swaus”. 

We implicitly assume the author is not the man on camera, as one rarely makes a YTP of themself. The real author is the person behind the editing, and they have implicitly assumed that we are familiar with Vine, YouTube poop, and the tropes and conventions therein. In fact, that knowledge is a prerequisite to finding this video funny at all.

An investigation by YouTuber Mr. Glowstick later found the original pieces of media that comprise the “swaus’ video. The man we see in the video was indeed a Vine user, but never got any sort of notoriety while the platform was around. In the original video, he informs us that city boys don’t drive lifted trucks because, allegedly, “they have swagger and wear them skinny jeans. Can’t pick their legs up that high. Gay!!” It was an uninspired and offensive joke about gay people. How disappointing.

I’ve spent about 800 words thoroughly explaining this joke (or rather, the lack thereof). Why is this video so compelling to me? 

The answer to this can be found by dissecting the relationship between my generation and the internet. The internet isn’t a tool for doing things, it’s a place we’ve lived, and I mean that in a literal sense. I, like most my age, have enacted relationships through the internet; formative conversations with friends happened on iMessage and Snapchat. My sense of humor and personality is in no small part influenced by the content I consume on YouTube and Reddit (for better or worse). Just because these things didn’t occur in the physical world doesn’t mean they didn’t leave an impact on the abstract entity that is my personality. The inconceivably complex network of synaptic firings that create your consciousness can’t tell the difference between material reality experienced through your eyes or digital reality experienced through a screen. The internet is real to me.

This video is fascinating not because it contains any sort of recognizable joke, but because it transcends the physical distance between me and the author. I understand the author’s intent and mindset, validating all of my own experiences which lead me to understand their reference. I do this aided by inconceivably complex technology that lets me share an absurd but genuine moment of connection. The author is telling me, “I grew up in this place too.” And they manage to do it with the word “swaus.” It is ridiculous, but it is art and you can’t convince me otherwise.