MEMES
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Iowa's Cewebrities whether it's all a put-on. Allmylifeforsale
Leslie Hall
At the top of the list is the famous Leslie Hall, rapper, sweater collector, artist, and international super-celebrity from Ames. You may have seen her at the Iowa Women's Music Festival, MTV, VH1, Tech TV, or like a million other things. If you're not familiar with her work you'll want to go ahead and Google “Gem Sweater.”
Not all internet memes involve cats, laughing stocks, or personal injuries caught on tape. In the case of Iowa City's own Allmylifeforsale, it can be an artistic take on web technologies. In 2001, John Freyer sold nearly all of his possessions on eBay. The project gained international attention and turned into a book and, rumor has it, a movie option.
Ben Johnson
Iowa's Funniest Guy
There are quite a few funny guys here in Iowa but no one makes the claim as much as YouTube's iowasfunniestguy. Iowasfunniestguy is a character and celebrity impersonator confident in his ability to make you laugh. His audience isn't so sure, or rather, they're unsure
lieve Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and is therefore not a U.S. citizen, and ineligible to serve as president. Putting a more absurdist spin on the Birthers was not automatically easy. But the
Some internet sensations are not selfmade. Case in point is Ben Johnson, the University of Iowa student and Chairman of the Iowa Federation of College Republicans. His sincere video testimonials made the rounds a couple of years ago after viewers suspected the wellgroomed Johnson might be graduating from College Republican to Log Cabin Republican. Matt Butler
joke was inherent in the Birthers own beliefs. What could be more absurd than claiming that the president (who had dealt with the questions of “Who Is He?” throughout his political career) was not a citizen? Logically, we
focused on the vice president, with his bluecollar, quintessentially “white” background of Scranton, Pennsylvania. We performed hours of research to make sure our idea had not already been attempted (thankfully, it hadn’t), and launched a Facebook group. A few days later, we produced a mock-scare video (to be fair, Rezayazdi deserves most of the production credit), and from there persisted in our attempts to gain mainstream acceptance. The success of Biden Birthers is testimonial to the persistence we maintained in pitching our “scandal.” It was over a full month before we had our major breakthrough (appearing on Politico), and only two days after that we made cable news. Littered among our sent mail folders were failed pitches to Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan, Colbert, and dozens of other pundits. Furthermore, we launched an Astroturf campaign, hailing the creation of Biden Birthers on every related (and plenty of non-related, too) blog post we could find. Our success, like most all meme creators', was fleeting. We received no compensation and no gratification besides the knowledge we had constructed a successful piece of satire. Ultimately, however, meme creators remain satisfied in the knowledge that they’ve contributed to that great laboratory of American culture: the hallowed halls and endless corridors of the internet. Nobody can ever claim to have fostered the greatest or most relevant meme Of All Time. They exist only in a nebulous web, forever ready to be joined by newcomers. Andrew Swift is a recent graduate of The University of Iowa, with a bachelor of arts in history and political science. A voracious follower of both domestic politics and international relations, his (much more serious) blog can be found at: transitionalstates.foreignpolicyblogs.com. He can be reached at andrew. swift@littlevillagemag.com
November 2009 | Little Village
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