Yo Dawg I Heard You Like

2007

Date: Summer 2007 · Place: Something Awful and 4chan · Figures: Alvin Joiner aka Xzibit, host of Pimp My Ride · anonymous macro authors · Tags: Image Macro, Recursion, Catchphrase 01. A Car Inside A Car Pimp My Ride airs on MTV from 2004 to 2007 with rapper Xzibit overseeing absurd vehicle modifications. The show's signature gag is installing a thing inside a thing, a fish tank in the trunk or a television in the steering wheel. Around mid-2007 the show's promotional photo of a grinning Xzibit becomes an image macro that names the joke. The grammar is fixed. Yo dawg, I heard you like X, so we put an X in your X so you can verb while you verb. The template makes recursion legible as humor. 02. The Joke About Embedding Yo Dawg is the meme that teaches a generation of users to recognize and laugh at nested structures. It thrives during the years when feed readers, embeds, and iframes are reshaping the web into objects within objects. It also marks the moment when a Black celebrity is conscripted as the unwitting face of an Anglo internet template, a pattern that will repeat through the decade. "Yo dawg I herd you like cars so we put a car in yo car so you can drive while you drive." — Canonical Xzibit macro, circa 2007 Sources • KnowYourMeme, 'Xzibit Yo Dawg' • MTV, 'Pimp My Ride' production records (2004-2007) • Limor Shifman, 'Memes in Digital Culture' (MIT Press 2014)