MER IL ET FOU (2009)

About

“MER IL ET FOU”, along with “ENKULER DE RIRE” and “Si j’été pas là, vous seriez vous”, are a French meme entirely based on the casual misspelling of a 13 years old boy. They became famous and corny catchphrases used to express respectively questioning about somebody’s sanity for the first slang, great euphoria for the second one and egocentric irony for the last one.

Origin

September the 27th 2009, we are on a forum hosted by “Gamekult”, a French website about video games.
A user named “Noyart” (of whom we’ll find out that his real name is Gabriel and he’s a 13 years old boy later on in the thread) created a topic because he is in the middle of a dilemma. He is torn in his choice to buy a game console and want to know the advantages and the drawbacks of a PSP.
While his message isn’t that bad written, with some slight mistakes and emoticons (like most of children/teenagers can do on the internet, one may say), a peculiar sentence can be seen: “MER IL ET FOU”

That sentence is written in all caps and initially emphasized that he anticipated being pointed out as crazy for planning to buy a PSP, supposedly because that game console, according to the video game media, has some selling difficulties throughout the world.

“MER IL ET FOU”‘s in-joke is hard to translate but would mean "but he’s crazy !". The way it’s written is similar to the writings used in Lolcats and could be translated word-to-word as “BUT HE AND CRAZY”, the correct “mais” word having nearly the same sound as “mer”. Another valid explanation for the “MER” word could be its closest French acronym: “MDR” => “Mort de rire” (laughing to death) which more or less means “LOL”.

Instant celebrity

Following that post, all the answers featured that sentence, some of them were already coupled with pictures, mainly from other memes such as Rageguy or Son, I’m disappoint

Noyart came back a first time, saying that he’d finally go to buy a PSP at the nearest shop. Yet, there was a constant stream of responses with different pictures and Noyart, who came back a second time, gave some kind of an ambiguous comment: “ENKULER DE RIRE”

One more time, this simple sentence, meaning roughtly “fucked by laughter”, certainly a stronger version of “PTDR” (PéTé De Rire = Broken in half laughing) or “EXPDR” (EXPlosé De Rire = Exploding from laughter), the French variants of ROFL and LMAO while the past tense is misplaced with the infinitive and the correct “C” letter has been misplaced with “K”, added more strength to the comments.
Quickly, the other posters found Noyart’s blog, allowing everyone to know about his name, age and the city where he lives.
Without being afraid, Noyart continued to play that “game” with all these posters and gave new strange but funny comments such as “si j’été pas là, vous seriez vous” => “If I were not there, where would you be” with “étais” (preterit “were” here) misspelt with “été” (past participle “been”) and “where” misspelt with “you”.

This thread, still active today, has led to 40 pages of comments and replies.

French new internet meme

The popularity of thess catchphrases exploded beyond Gamekult’s website and they got featured in several blogs and articles, seeing them as “The new teenage way of speaking”:

• Blogasty article
• Paper blog article
• Oreille malade
• Yourteube
• Gaduman.com

Here’s a google list summing up most of the forums and blogs that talks about it/creates derivatives.

A Facebook fan club based on the ENKULER DE RIRE sentence has been created in mid-October 2009 and has already gathered about 4 000 fans, and is constantly gathering more fans.

Two other ones based on MER IL EST FOU were also created.

Moreover, websites entirely dedicated to the meme were created:

• http://www.meriletfou.com/ dealing with image parodies and an IRC channel only reserved to the meme.

• http://www.enkulerderire.com/ gathering mainly twitter accounts talking about the meme. (Now redirects to another blog that has nothing to do with the meme)