Mr. Snake, Meet Mr. Shark

[robotnik2004]

I want somebody with a paid LJ account to set up a poll / betting pool: When will Snakes on a Plane and all related references cease to be funny? Because it still cracks me up (because there's all these snakes see... and they're on a plane) but I can feel it waning.

So what do you think? When do the snakes jump the shark?

• It happened the instant I posted this.


• The moment the SoaP phenomenon is mentioned on NPR.


• The moment the SoaP phenomenon is mentioned on the CBC. (Bonus points if Cameron Philips calls it "Snakes on Planes" or "The Snake Plane" or otherwise gets it wrong.)


• The day the movie comes out.


• About twelve minutes into the movie, opening night, after you've dropped $10 on a ticket and $5 on snax, and everyone cheers when the title comes up, but then the movie itself starts, and the realization sets in that this is a crap movie, it's always been a crap movie, made by the star of Sphere and the director of Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco and the writer of Mermaid Chronicles Part 1: She Creature, and yeah, it's gonna take a hell of a lot more than ironic amusement at the title to carry you through 86 more minutes.


• When I'm visiting my parents next Christmas, and my Dad says, "Hey, guys, check out this great Samuel Jackson movie I rented for us all to watch!"


• When I'm walking down the street wearing my SoaP t-shirt, feeling like an ironic hipster, and I run into a friend wearing his Vote for Pedro t-shirt, and we chat a little about our mortgages, and then I realize all these kids born in the 1990s are laughing at us, and I shake my fist and try to chase them but get winded after half a block, and also my son/daughter spits up all over me.


• Never! What is funny now will always be funny!! ALWAYS!!!*

This, on the other hand, will never stop being funny, ever.



(Via Chris' Invincible Super-Blog.)

Edit, redited to be less bitchy: It's been brought to my attention that, hard as it is to believe, some people never thought SoaP was funny. They are of course entitled to opinions. Part of the appeal of SoaP is (was?) the randomness of it: if it hits your brain at the right angle, it cracks you up, and if it doesn't, no amount of explaining it will make it funnier. But I did delete some comments along the lines of "it was never funny", because I thought they'd offer little help to those of us who do/did find it funny in analyzing the complex neurocultural chemistry of when it will cease to be so. That was probably rude, and I apologize, but come on: snakes! On a! And so forth!

*See also: "Yeah, baby! Do I make you horny?"

Comments

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

The rule, should you happen to care, is that anything that appears in the New York Times' "Trends" section is no longer a trend. So by extrapolation, SoaP (which stopped being funny to me about a week ago) stops being funny the instant any New York Times writer tries to be funny with it.

Conversely, if the New York Times published a big, long dudgeon-filled article about the death of creative imagination in Hollywood, and Pointed With Alarm to SoaP, *then* SoaP would still be funny. Funnier, even.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right. I knew somebody could provide a definitive answer.

"New Study Shows Today is Mostly, but Not Entirely, Unchanged from Yesterday. Does This Trend Offer a Chilling Portrait of Tomorrow?"

[sben.livejournal.com]

Looks like (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=%22Snakes+on+a+Plane%22&srchst=nyt) it's as funny as ever.