Deez Nuts

A caller sets up a mundane question and delivers the answer: deez nuts. Welven Harris, posting as Welven da Great, made the version that spread in early 2015, and the setup-and-payoff structure was reproduced by hundreds of thousands of people. The joke itself dates to a Warren G skit on Dr Dre's The Chronic in 1992.

It first appeared in 2015, during the platform era.

It is the only internet catchphrase to have stood for public office. In July 2015 a fifteen-year-old in Wallingford, Iowa, filed a statement of candidacy for the presidency of the United States under the name Deez Nuts; Public Policy Polling put the candidate at eight and nine per cent in three states, and mainstream outlets covered the result seriously before The Daily Beast identified the filer.

Warren G endorsed the candidacy. The episode became the standard illustration of how third-party polling numbers actually work — the pollster's own analyst observed that a segment of the electorate would give any anti-establishment name its seven or eight per cent. In Texas in 2016 the name outpolled both a Green Party candidate and a dead gorilla.