Is the coconut tree the most consequential dumb joke of the year?

Plus: More on Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet

Greetings from Read Max Temporary Independence Day HQ at an undisclosed location in New Jersey! Today’s edition covers:

• The “coconut tree” meme as an unexpectedly consequential development in the 2024 presidential election; and

• More thoughts on the origin and development of “the Zynternet” subculture discussed in last week’s newsletter.

A request: Read Max is composed every week thanks to the financial support of paying readers. Almost all of my income comes from this newsletter, and I wouldn’t be able to put the kind of thought, research, writing, and other labor that goes into it--even when that labor consists of watching Kamala Harris video--without the generosity of readers who find the newsletter worth not just their time but their money. If you find what I’m doing informative, helpful, entertaining, “not depressing,” “depressing but in a funny way,” etc., please consider upgrading to a paid subscription:

How Kamala Harris fell out of a coconut tree

The situation is still fluid, but it’s looking more and more Joever every day, and the most shocking development is what seems to be¹ a pretty broad willingness from all wings of the party to accept Vice-President Kamala Harris as a replacement nominee. Such apparent coalitional unity around a once-divisive figure like Harris was unthinkable even six months ago, and the story of her transformation from a dismissed and sidelined also-ran to the prediction-market favorite to be the 2024 Democratic nominee for president is in part a function of the urgency of the crisis and the party’s collective desire for a smooth and seamless transition. But when histories of the moment are written, I would hope they include at least a footnote noting a minor but nonetheless meaningful factor in Harris’ potential coronation: The coconut tree meme.

Last year, during a swearing-in ceremony of “Commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics,” Harris delivered the following remarks (bolding mine):

Part of the extension of the work you will do is, yes, focused on our young leaders and our young people, but understanding we also then have to be clear about the needs of their parents and their grandparents and their teachers and their communities, because none of us just live in a silo.  Everything is in context.
 
My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people.  You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”  (Laughs.)
 
You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
 
So all of this is part of the work of this group of extraordinary leaders who will help inform and advise how we think about our work and, like the Secretary said, give us feedback, give us counsel, give us direction in how we best achieve our mission, doing it in a way that we fully understand the challenges and the opportunities.

Video of the bolded portion was quickly clipped by the GOP War Room YouTube account, and for most of the rest of the year it circulated at a low simmer on the conservative internet as vague evidence of a substance-abuse problem, usually accompanied by a caption like “Obviously drunk. This is the person in charge of both AI and the US border.”

By early 2024, however, it had moved off of partisan Republican Twitter and on to left or left-adjacent Twitter, where it was understood as evidence of a kind of ironically appreciable, off-kilter charisma, and was more often captioned with something like “this video is literally like medicine to me. I watch it once every week or two and every time I do I get an enduring hit of light euphoria for the next 45 minutes.”

No one on or near the left, for whom Harris’ background as a prosecutor (among other things) made her anathema as a candidate, was making a conscious effort to recuperate Harris’ reputation as a politician or policymaker by sharing the meme. If anything, the fact that her kooky demeanor could be flippantly celebrated by people who strongly disliked her politics was reflective of her total juicelessness--a non-entity politician who’d washed out of the 2020 primaries and effectively disappeared as Vice President. She was, simply, not a threat. (Even people making the at-the-time taboo argument that Biden should probably step aside rarely invoked Harris as his replacement.)

And so even though, or maybe because, Harris was counted out as a viable political force, the spread of the coconut tree clip, alongside a number of others in which Harris appears to operating under a relatively heavy dose of benzodiazepines, had the effect of re-calibrating her character in the general Twitter consciousness (which is to say the general political and media elite consciousness) from “politically juiceless and superficial superficial ex-cop” to something like “fun aunt a few hours after Thanksgiving dinner” or “fourth-hour morning-show host.”

This kind of shift is never determinative in elections or political contests, but it’s no small thing either, and campaigns go to great lengths, and at great expense, to try to define the “characters” their candidates are playing in the extended television serial/ARG that is American presidential elections. (Bill Clinton--slick womanizer; Al Gore--uptight nerd; George W. Bush--smirking moron; John Kerry--pretentious patrician; Barack Obama--cool guy who would probably be pretty close friends with a given journalist if they met under different circumstances.²)

Three or four decades ago, this kind of two- or three-word persona was largely set by some combination of Saturday Night Live, Maureen Dowd, and Garry Trudeau. In the late social-media era, the work of reducing politicians to funny caricature versions of themselves is more decentralized. Twitter and TikTok are like bigger and somehow even more annoying writers’ rooms, with posters pitching and refining concepts for characters. For Harris, “barred-out aunt” clearly struck a chord, because it’s specific, relatively accurate, and funny.

I want to reiterate that the fact that Kamala Harris now has a pretty meme/sketch persona is absolutely not the reason that she has become the nomination favorite, and very few of the people sharing the coconut tree memes are doing so out of a genuine affection for Harris the person, politician, or candidate. But I think the coconut tree joke has been a useful one. It’s much easier to throw your weight behind someone toward whom you feel a kind of familiar warmth, even if the familiarity and warmth is mostly meme-based.

As one Twitter user put it, “I’m all in on President Kamala. We need a Gemini Rising woman President from California who is on pills+wine, is campy, and didn’t get married until she was middle aged because she was too busy being a 365 party girlboss. Who cares if she’s weird? At least she’s not a felon or 80.” If previously it had been hard to understand precisely what Harris’ deal was (“In Search of Kamala Harris,” went the Times headline last year), the coconut tree has given her a familiar and relatable (if not wholly positive) shape and identity--a context, you might say.

Hawk 2-ah

Last week I wrote about “Hawk Tuah,” the latest international blowjob meme, and the strangely familiar internet culture that spawned it: “The Zynternet.” While a fully genealogy of the Zynternet was beyond the scope of that particular newsletter, many people pointed out that I had neglected to mention one of the most obvious antecedents: The Chive, one of the corniest websites to ever exist. If you want to remember the Chive, I highly recommend Jordan Larson’s 2013 Awl piece on the culture, still available at the Internet Archive:

If you spot a Chiver, he’s probably wearing Bill Murray’s face on a t-shirt, or the phrase “Keep Calm and Chive On” somewhere on his body or social media profile. Likely he has a “KCCO” phone case, towel, beer cozy, or bumper sticker. Chive gear is how Chivers — and Chivettes, their female counterparts — identify each other in the wild. […] The Chive is, on its face, a collection of funny pictures culled from around the web. There are also plenty of photos of half-naked women, photo galleries of animals making dumb faces and people horrifically crashing their BMX bikes. Recurring features have names like FLBP (future lower back pain), Hump Day, Burnsday (that’s burn your bra Thursday), and Frisky Friday. […] By plugging into a grown-up non-Ivy college dude mindset, the Chive has crafted the perfect fantasy: everyone here likes girls, funny pictures, drinking, charity, and you. The basis of this community isn’t a common interest so much as a common lifestyle: the Chive has taken an already extant personality type and given it a home with a brand. In the matrix of online communities, they’re somewhere between Redditors who like to go outside and juggalos who don’t wear complicated get-ups.

One way of thinking about the Zynternet, I suppose, is as if you somehow removed all traces of Redditism from the Chive and left only the boorishness and the more malevolent horniness. Other sites I’d cite as antecedents include Tucker Max, Maddox/The Best Page in the Universe, TotalFratMove, SportsbyBrooks, and, from certain angles, Fark. Someone else is welcome to put together a full genealogy.

1. Look, this is all fully vibes-based analysis, but we left behind the safe earth gravity of positivist political commentary on this situation a long time ago.

2. Funnily enough, Biden himself was the most recent beneficiary of a kind of re-casting process, thanks almost entirely to The Onion, which decided during the Obama administration to take a guy mostly known for being a plagiarist and gaffe-prone corporate Democrat and turn him into a sort of Florida-uncle legend character known as “Diamond” Joe Biden, paving the way for all the “malarkey” stuff on which the real Biden has built a new political persona. (Not unlike “kooky aunt Kamala Harris,” “Diamond Joe Biden” was created when it seemed implausible that Biden would ever run for president, or really even have much of a political career after the administration.)