How my Meme made it to ‘Moon Knight” and essentially became Marvel Lore
A lot has happened in the fifteen years since a viral video of me being punched in my face. EDM artists have remixed me; streamers, YouTubers, and podcasters have quoted me endlessly; Will Smith featured me in an Instagram post, and I became a meme.
All of this was overturned a decade later when it was discovered that Oscar Isaac was a big fan of my meme and that it had directly influenced a scene on Moon Knight.
It feels absurd to write that sentence. It turns out that Disney fought the actor to insert a nod to the meme in an episode of Moon Knight. (Specifically, episode 4, ‘The Tomb. In an interview with Screen Rant, he even speaks my words on camera. (Which can be viewed in the embed below. It also includes that same word. )
This is the first time I have ever seen this happen. We’re talking Oscar Isaac. He’s Llewyn Davis. He is the man who got Drive beaten to death. He plays the role of Poe Dameron in Star Wars. He is Timothee Chalamet’s dad in Dune. How is it possible that he has seen the stupid video I uploaded to YouTube in 2007? This has never happened to me before. This makes no sense.
The video contains me being punched in my face after pushing Tim off a chair. This detail is not included in the video making the rounds on 4chan since November 2007. However, it is what I tried to do before Tim started to mock me.
In the last 15 years, the internet has changed significantly. The YouTube comments section was a place where anyone could ping you with a casual death threat or claim that they were going after you. It was funny at the time but it made me shudder for the better part of a decade.
Now, fast forward to the mid-2010s when people were more open to memedom. Half the people who interact with this content today weren’t born when the video was uploaded. This is quite alarming.
Vine and TikTok, short-form video formats that are also available in video format, have helped to increase the video’s popularity. Its lack of context has left others still baffled. This has led to people wondering what we were trying to accomplish before the punch halted it all. It’s all something I will explain one day. But for now, I’m content with the strange legacy it has left.
It’s not clear how Oscar Isaac found it, but it is true that I was delighted to hear him quote it. It’s one thing for me to appear in meme compilations and sometimes have to explain the clip at the pub. It’s quite another to watch someone you love and admire quote you and then confess that he tried to squeeze a tribute to you into a Marvel TV show because he and his brother were fans. It doesn’t happen. That’s absurd.
It is also amazing that he thinks I am rapping. I was not rapping. Oscar Isaac wants me to rap.
Isaac claims that he shot several takes of episode 4’s scene where his character punches him in the face and then repeats the question. (A friend of mine cut Oscar’s impressions of me into the clip, which is like this embedded tweet.
He hoped that Marvel would allow the inclusion of the first F-bomb in its TV series. But it didn’t. It will be a haunting reminder that Oscar Isaac, 16 years old, shot footage of Paul in their home on the set for a multimillion-dollar Marvel property.
Although I don’t know how you persuade Disney to release rushes from the cutting-room floor, I can tell you that I have never desired to see more in my life.
Or, you could choose to be Oscar Isaac’s best friend. What can we do to make this happen? #releasetheahfuckcut? Internet, please make it happen.
