ViralWorld

Poe's law

“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist”
This is something people said. There is no recording of it to show.

2005·Early YouTube

The observation that, without a clear sign of joking, a parody of an extreme view cannot be told from the real thing.

At a glanceThe facts

Spread in
2005
Format
Phrase
Era
Early YouTube
Made by
Nathan Poe, a member of christianforums.com
What it said
“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist”
Where it started
A forum thread about evolution
Origin
No single original
Available
Not held by ViralWorld

What this wasThe story

Nathan Poe's 2005 forum observation, now one of the handful of named laws the internet actually uses. It describes the exact condition of most of the modern web.

TimelineIn order

  1. Made

    Jerry Schwarz advises Usenet readers against sarcasm, and notes that a sideways smile shows a writer is only kidding.1

  2. Made

    Nathan Poe posts the sentence that takes his name.1

  3. Mainstream

    Wired calls it the most important internet phenomenon of the year.1

What people misrememberSet straight

Commonly remembered asIt was about extremism in general.

ActuallyIt was about creationism. It was widened afterwards to any fundamentalism or extremism.1

Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast

Where it came fromWhat we know

This spread through many posts rather than one identifiable original. The example shown is one surviving copy and is not claimed as the first.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this. It spread through many posts rather than from one identifiable original.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

More from 2005You were there

SourcesWhat was read

  1. Wikipedia — Poe’s law

Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things

Keep browsingElsewhere on ViralWorld