Hurr Durr

About

Hurr or Hurr Durr is an interjection used to criticize a post that is considered subpar or unentertaining, or alternatively, to express sarcastic laughter. Similar to the image macro application of "Derp," this expression is often paired with images in which the subjects are gaping awkwardly or looking unflattering.

Origin

Before it became paired with "durr," the word "hurr" appeared alone on sites like the Something Awful forums where it was used in similar vein to the sarcastic laughter “har har”^[3] in responding to a dumb joke. This usage of "hurr" has been noted as early as March 27th, 2003 in a Something Awful thread^[5] about 1970's adult films. Hurr was first defined on Urban Dictionary^[4] as a caricature of "a dumb sounding laugh" on June 28th, 2003. By July 2006^[6], hurr had been implemented as an emoticon^[7] on the site.

One of the earliest archived mentions of "hurr durr" also took place on the Something Awful Forums. On August 17th, 2007, the phrase appeared as commentary^[1] on dialogue used in the dating sim game Sakura Wars: Atsuki Chishio ni^[2] in a Let's Play thread.

Spread

“Hurr durr” was defined on Urban Dictionary^[8] on June 20th, 2008:

"Hurr durr" is the sound of laughter coming from someone with half a brain. Mostly it is used to point out when someone has made an idiotic claim, though, surprisingly, idiot males will attempt to make thier laugh as deep as possible to make them sound more manly, when all it really does is make them sound like idiots.

Since 2009, captioned photos with the phrase have appeared on the single-topic blog Image Macros.^[14] Collections of these have been shared on Urlesque^[17] in April 2010 and the Chive^[18] in April 2011. The phrase has also appeared in over 20 archived 4chan threads^[15], including one plotting equations^[16] from a hurr durr chart that took place on the /sci/ (science and math) board on March 27th, 2010.

On September 16th, 2009, the domain for the single serving site hurr-durr.com^[9] was registered, which displays a GIF animation of a pug shaking around with the gibberish chorus from "Chacarron Macarron". The site uses Javascript to keep the window or tab open while triggering pop up windows so the user cannot exit the page. The site has been used as a bait and switch on Yahoo! Answers^[11] to draw visits from the curious readers. Hurr-durr.com has been parodied on Newgrounds^[12] and also has nearly 1000 likes on Facebook.^[13]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Peaks for just the word "hurr" have appeared nearly every year in August or September, with the exception of June 2010. The search volume may be affected by the other definition of "hurr" as slang for "hair,"^[10] which began in 2008. Search for "hurr durr" began to pick up in September 2008 and reached an all-time high in May 2011.

External References