The Joseph Goebbels Power Hour

Legogate: How I broke the internet on Christmas Day

A little bit of genocide never hurt anyone. But there’s no telling that to the internet.

There's a special trapdoor in the Twitter algorithm that only opens when a Westerly wind blows under a waxing moon, as Saturn transits through Libra. It opens like the puzzlebox from Hellraiser, and the worst of humanity comes out to play.

On Christmas Day, I inadvertently opened a portal with a controversial post about 'Lego Gaza,' which garnered 19.9 million views, 141,000 likes, and over 4,000 vitriolic comments. Only Donald Trump had a more viral post that day.

Having scheduled it weeks before I fucked off on holiday and buried it in my memory like an anti-personnel mine. It wasn't even a meme I'd created. It had been sent to me, like so many others by people who are now too terrified to admit that something as benign as a meme made them laugh.

Before I could even begin my morning drinking, the cursed thing had hit a thousand likes. By the time I settled down to savour my sumptuous salmon dinner, it had soared to ten thousand. The engagement continued to accelerate like a stolen Vauxhall Corsa as an atrocious commentary entered my life like a fart through silk pajamas.

The meme itself offers no context, leaving it wide open for interpretation, making it the ultimate Rorschach test. What you see reflects what's inside you. Like all great humour, your interpretation is purely subjective; your reaction reveals more about you than it does about the meme itself.

The Palestine Massive saw it as a cruel and sadistic celebration of the deaths of Palestinian children and an excuse to unleash a tidal wave of vitriolic psychopathy.

This transformed the comment section into a spectacle reminiscent of the infamous Nazi rallies at Nuremburg. A cracked-out flash flood of bastards foaming at the mouth in an endless orgy of outrage like a frenzied bukkake party at the Reichstag. This was nothing short of pandemonium.

In the confusion I was somehow mistaken for being an old Jew. I’d gone to bed on Christmas Eve a Roma gypsy and woken up as Larry David. I’d posted a meme and suddenly I subjected to an anti-Semitic lynch mob, and I wasn’t even Jewish.

The meme ran wild for 36 hours in a stampede of neurotic psychopathy wrapped up in morality. Every acerbic insult you can image, thrown down the empty well where my fucks should be. But alas, there were none.

At teatime on Boxing Day, the post was removed, flagged for breaching community standards due to violent speech — an irony that will likely be lost to history.

But it wasn’t over. My inbox began to swell with explicit death threats, international news platforms began to circle like vultures. I was mentioned in articles as far away as Turkey and India, making it impossible for me to visit their countries, should ever feel an inexplicable need for a cheap boobjob or felt like catching dysentery.

Many of the more moderate complaints tried to make the clever point that I wouldn’t joke about the Holocaust. So I produced a video of me doing that very thing.

Of course the meme is in bad taste. If you haven’t noticed that’s my schtick. Comedy has long been confused as a congeniality competition and as far as I’m concerned, morality has no place within it. It is my fervent belief that in humour, nothing is sacred.

It should go without saying that nobody celebrates the death of innocent children. Not even ginger kids. Even Harvey Price knows that.

But this was never about Gaza. This wasn’t about dead kids or genocide. This was a digital feeding frenzy for the criminally insane. An episode of mass psychosis that rained blood from the effervescent psychosphere. An excuse for twisted minds

In what world was this a reasonable response to anything? People will do almost anything to not be uncomfortable. And that’s where comedy belongs.

What is this religious obsession with exposure? The retarded notion that people are accountable to the internet? The belief that if someone is painted as a heretic that they will dissipate into the ether or crawl under some rock never to be seen again?

In spite of all this I had a lovely time watching Mary Poppins and finished off the Quality Street. But it left me with more questions than answers.

How did this happen? How did a meme reach twenty million people? How did an unknown, semi-professional comedian, who still does middle spots at small clubs with 4,000 followers on Twitter manage to set fire to the internet on Christmas Day?

That Christmas morning, a sea of tweets surged forth, each one a digital whisper in the cacophony of festivity. The holy spirit of the algorithm, omniscient and ever-watchful, scanned through this digital deluge. Its spectral finger, long and discerning, outstretched, and with a whisper both soft and ominous, chose mine.

Hand-picked from the multitude, it was placed strategically where it could wreak the most havoc. The algorithm then supercharged that reach, feeding it an endless supply of enriched plutonium, until it swelled into a monstrosity, fat and repellent, like hate-crime foie gras, ripe for consumption by the tweekers of outrage.

I suppose it wasn't entirely bleak. I managed to have a good chuckle and unearthed a goldmine of fresh material for my stand-up routines. Even better, I finally achieved monetization, and this flood of madness should help me whittle down my ever-looming cocaine debt.

What did I glean from this unspeakable fiasco? Precious little, to be honest. What lessons could possibly be drawn? That there's no moral high ground to claim? That beneath the veneer, we're all scoundrels? I was already well aware of that. Now, that meme serves as an enduring monument to my deepening contempt for humanity and the wholesale redundancy of empathy.

If there's any lesson to be distilled from this, it's this: for one bizarre day in the dead of winter, on Christmas Day in 2024, I held dominion over the internet. And in that moment, I came to understand - the internet isn't worth possessing.