When I find a blog I really like, I’ll go back and read all of the old posts as if it were actually a webcomic. Hyperbole and a Half is certainly like a webcomic. It has illustrations, plot, and a main character. It has more text than a webcomic, but it’s quality, funny text.

It also has mandatory sex parties.

I actually should say that it doesn’t have them, or I at least I couldn’t find one. It just made them famous.

Once upon a time the author wrote a blog post saying that she Googled the term, with quotes, “mandatory sex party”. The only hit that came up was her own blog. This made her sad. She called upon her readers to fix this and fill the internet with mentions of mandatory sex parties. Some people love audience participation, and even though I’m reading a year old archive I said, “I have a blog! I want in!”.

First I had a look to see what had happened since her post, so long ago, in the year of our lord, two thousand nine.

I searched “mandatory sex party” (including the quotes), and Google returned about 10,900 results.

I’ve seen and heard a lot of memes, and I’ve watched things go viral, but still I am amazed. Behold, the power of the mighty internet. Some woman (or superhero?) from the vast reaches of the internet says, “Jump!” to a bunch of faceless entities on the internet (us), and what do we do? We JUMP. Why?

I think the internet, as a whole collection of faceless entities, has a certain overall brand of humor for its most active participants. This humor thinks the term mandatory sex parties is really funny. This humor loves the idea of arbitrarily spreading the term, even if the actual concept that would lie behind such a term is kind of disturbing. That’s the weird thing. Most of these faceless entities not only will never experience a mandatory sex party (whatever that is), they don’t want to.

The term is funny, but the actual prank and humor actual has to do with search engines. The term is said and this is the reaction:

“What? Ha. What are you talking about? Haha.”

That’s it.

To the term “mandatory sex party”, add pranking a search engine. The term is said over and over until Google goes from one hit to over ten thousand instances of the term mandatory sex party. The reaction is:

“Wait… what? Really? Seriously? Hahahaha! That’s hilarious.”

Yes, I’m saying manipulation of a search engine is funny. We’ve come a long way from water filled buckets on door jams.