Mr. T Ate My Balls

» see cen.uiuc.edu/~nkpatel/mr.t/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In the spring of 1996 some students on Nehal Patel's floor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign knocked the glass out of an EXIT sign, scratched the paint off it, and wrote MR. T ATE MY BALLS where the letters had been. Patel and some friends decided the joke deserved a webpage, and in March they built one on his university account at cen.uiuc.edu.

The page itself was four JPEGs. Mr. T, cut out against a flat background, with a comic thought balloon pasted beside him. I sure could go for some BALLS right now. I pity the fool who don't like BALLS. The image editing is exactly as good as you would expect from a student with whatever paint program came with the machine, and the files are around 45 KB each, which in 1996 was a real wait.

Then it spread, and spreading is the part that matters. The format was trivially copyable, so people copied it: Chewbacca Ate My Balls, Hanson Ate My Balls, hundreds of versions with whatever celebrity the author found funny. Yahoo gave the family its own directory category under Tasteless Humor. By 2000 the Miami Herald reported Patel's original page had taken more than 800,000 hits, and Dave Barry had written about the phenomenon in a newspaper column.

The ending has no announcement attached to it, because student pages do not get announcements. The archive shows the page serving normally through 11 October 1999 with its content unchanged for most of that year. The directory was still there in November 2000. By 3 June 2001 the same address returns a 404, and it never comes back. Somewhere in that gap Patel finished with the university, or the university finished with the account. Nothing has been served from that address since.

~ the case file ~

~ the panel ~

It is worth saying plainly what the joke was, because it does not survive explanation and that is itself the point. The whole thing is a photograph of a recognizable person with an adolescent punchline pasted beside him in a speech balloon. There is no second layer. Salon covered it in August 1997 with the slightly stunned tone of a publication documenting something it could not defend.

What made it a format rather than a joke was the emptiness. Any face fits in the template, so making your own version took about ten minutes, and the reward was that your friends saw your name on a webpage. That is the same engine every meme has run on since. Hundreds of people worked it out for themselves between 1996 and 2000.

~ the copies ~

The copycats mostly lived on free hosts, and the free hosts are why almost none of them survive. GeoCities or Angelfire, whatever had a signup form: a teenager uploaded four images and a page of HTML, and when the host emptied out, so did the entire genre. The Ate My Balls family is documented today mainly through the archive and through people writing down what they remember. Neither one gives you the pages back.

~ what the server kept ~

The EXIT sign went up in 1996. My first browser was still two years off, and Illinois was a long way from the room where I would eventually open it, so the format had saturated and started to decay before I could have seen any of it. Nobody in my circle was making versions, partly because the joke only parses in English, mostly because the culture that produced it was an American college dorm and we did not have one of those.

The detail that does reach across is the file size. Those four images are about 45 KB each. On the line I had, one of them took the better part of a minute to appear, drawing in bands down the screen, and you decided whether to keep waiting based on what the top third looked like. A format built out of pictures that heavy, made by students on a university connection, was being viewed by most of the world on a connection that made each panel a small commitment. The pages are gone and the JPEGs are still in the archive, which is a fair result.

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