Meanwhile... In Germany.

How Fails help us to publicly indulge our schadenfreude... without fail

By David Donnelly

Note: Our ice-capading hero (a.k.a. Gustav Von Fracturedtailbone) drops a bunch of expletives at 0:20 but it really adds something in terms of foreshadowing and narrative arc, so watch that part if you think you can handle it. 
Proving that some lessons are better learnt from first hand experience, this week's chart topping viral video is an all too familiar sight. Ah yes, the ol' cannonball into a frozen pool. That always ends well (spoiler alert: it doesn't). Autsch!

Part of the allure of the Internet has always been the way that seemingly obscure photos, videos and web pages gain momentum and begin to invade all facets of popular culture. Before the advent of sites such as Youtube and Flickr, these Internet memes clogged our email inboxes. Now they’re also on blogs, prime-time television, nightly newscasts and being shared across Facebook and Twitter.

Until recently, the most popular viral video was the infamous "Gangnam Style", but this intelligent, coccyx-breaking, cannonballing enthusiast has knocked Psy off the top spot, being shared 1,200,756 times in the last 7 days, compared to 776,430 shares for the K-Pop anthem, as of October 23rd.

In terms of virality, the Fail meme has been prevalent since the turn of the century and is internet slang to denote situations with unfortunate outcomes. Fail or Epic Fail is commonly superimposed as a caption on to photo's or short videos depicting people falling short of their expectations. Although Slate stipulates that:

The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well... Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.

Variations include Imminent Fail - to denote the seconds prior to a failure and Owned (Pwned) - synonymous with a high degree of failure, the term strongly implies domination, severe defeat, and/or humiliation of a rival, among others.

The earliest documented usage of the term “FAIL” can be traced back to a Japanese 16-bit scrolling shooter game, Blazing Star (1998), often mocked for its grammatically incorrect “game over” message that reads:

YOUR SKILL IS NOT ENOUGH-

SEE YOU NEXT TIME- BYE BYE.”

As seen with the All Your Base are Belong to Us meme:

Retro video game narrative + Engrish = powerful source of lulz.

The Fail meme hit widespread notoriety and popularity in May of 2008, marked by the launch of Failblog, a guide to the taxonomy of fail and a chronicler of humiliation, which has sparked a proliferation of sub-genres and spin-offs to the traditional fail. Subsequently our need for the traditional push media format of Funniest Home Videos has been superseded by the internet and it's application as an outlet for expressing our schadenfreude out loud.

And as the pop cultural yardstick, The Simpsons eloquently illustrates (pun-intended) just how content we are with viewing the failure of others, particularly when it involves people hurting themselves for comedic effect.