Friday saw the early release of Michael Wolff’s Trump tome Fire And Fury, sending the media into a frenzy to screenshot the entire book and pick it apart on Twitter. The book has sold out in most places and plenty is being written about the many salacious tales within, but one that stands out above them all isn’t real:
Wow, this extract from Wolff’s book is a shocking insight into Trump’s mind: pic.twitter.com/1ZecclggSa
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) January 5, 2018
PixelatedBoat is the genius comedic mind behind Milkshake Duck — the lovely duck that drinks milkshakes and also happens to be racist — and now he can claim another internet sensation thanks to Trump’s Gorilla Channel. On its own, it is a perfectly funny fake excerpt from a book and something that PixelatedBoat does very well — though he gives plenty of credit to former MTV writer Kaleb Horton — but the reason it took off is due to many the folks online who started to believe that the excerpt was real.
https://twitter.com/HashtagGriswold/status/949290016781602816
https://twitter.com/HashtagGriswold/status/949337220418285573
Some are noteworthy critics of the president up to this point, leading to some questioning if we’ve finally reached too far into the conspiracy bin against Trump, while others were out to ruin the joke as much as possible.
https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/949343808298278913
I assumed it was fake. Read like something @BorowitzReport would write.
— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) January 5, 2018
SuperDeluxe explains the entire route of the joke from start to finish, including the very true final aspect of #GorillaChannel:
— Tatered (@tatered) January 5, 2018
But after several were fooled, others caught the fever and decided to run with the joke by adding their own spin on things. This includes tweets from Netflix asking for folks to stop asking about the Gorilla Channel and Animal Planet making it a bit of a reality:
please stop calling our customer service hotline to ask if we have The Gorilla Channel
— Netflix (@netflix) January 6, 2018
What makes for a Gorilla Channel? A lot of eating, sleeping, and, of course, playtime! pic.twitter.com/cnXOSSY07z
— Animal Planet (@AnimalPlanet) January 5, 2018
It also ended up doing some good as the Fossey Gorilla Fund used the hashtag that was a spawned as a way to raise awareness for “critically endangered gorillas” in Africa:
Our #GorillaChannel features the latest on the critically endangered gorillas of Africa and the struggle to preserve a future for them. Join us in spreading awareness and fulfilling our mission of "helping people, saving gorillas". https://t.co/3pgkA43Zqa pic.twitter.com/bA0SJ4SXqW
— Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) January 5, 2018
In the end, we need to go back to the source to get the best reaction to the entire thing:
https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/949118287480111104
Wonder if this new display name will help. Probably not.
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) January 5, 2018
It’s a fine way to kick off 2018 and sets the bar high for the internet memes to come.