Forums / Meme Research

I saw this on Urlesque this morning. Cowbell girl is not amused. http://www.urlesque.com/2010/01/05/cowbell-girl-meme/

This got me thinking about the needs more cowbell meme entry. It’s pretty bare.

We already know that the SNL sketch is where the “needs more cowbell” joke began.

The phrase has been used on some image macros and many of them serve as basic references to the sketch.

The bored cowbell girl also has a facebook group.

So what do you think? What should be added to the existing “needs more cowbell” entry? And does Cowbell Girl need her own entry?

I’ve looked a little deeper, and the Cowbell Girl meme is off to a good start but I think we should give it a bit of breathing room before writing up an entry on it. It’s off to a promising start, but I think we should let it grow a bit first.

Yesterday, this video was uploaded to Youtube.

It got around 20,000 views overnight. It was posted to Buzzfeed 10 hours ago, where it got another 1500 views or so. http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimp/boise-states-sad-cowbell-girl-66g

The same day, it was mashed up with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, in reference to the SNL sketch. Naturally.

On Twitter, it seems like tweets just started about an hour ago. http://trendistic.com/cowbell-girl/_90-days

me and my mom saw that last night and died laughing

Oh man! The Blue Oyster Cult video was removed already. That sucks.

i dont even..

Check out this headline: Boise State Sad Girl is Blind, We Are All Monsters

Edit: and behind the scenes

I take issue with the way this has been portrayed as “having fun at the expense of a blind woman.”

We saw a girl playing the cowbell who looked like she was not having any fun it. The cowbell was an obvious tie-in with the SNL sketch. Her boredom was something that anyone who was stuck playing a cowbell or triangle can empathize with.

I think that people who enjoyed that moment were laughing with her empathetically. And even if there were some who were laughing at her, it was in a “sucks to be you, stuck playing the cowbell” way, not a “sucks to be you, being blind” way. It’s kind of hard to laugh at a blind girl for being blind before you’re even aware of her being blind in the first place. Had she been deaf, or playing darts, then I could understand how people would say we were laughing at her expense.

In my opinion, sightedness has nothing to do with empathizing with the lackluster feeling of playing a cowbell.

Personally I think the lols are only enhanced by the explanation ^_

I heard a mix on my XM radio of the original skit. It was some techno thing that didn’t really have anything to do with “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” but it had clips of Walken mixed in with…cowbell techno.

I don’t remember the name of it, or the group, but I’ll see if I can dig anything up on it.

Considering Boot to the Head and Zoolander Dance have been cataloged as popular parody memes, i vote for more cowbell up in this joint.

Somewhat related to the cowbell girl image macro: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/x-is-not-amused