By now, we’ve all seen the video of the Dramatic Chipmunk, which tore up the charts last week with 2500+ Likes on Collegehumor and forever redefined the notion of “drama” (sorry, TNT). However, as much as phenomenally viral events like this say about our current state of culture — in which a five-second video entertained more people than most of the summer’s feature films — it is the week after a viral bomb drops that truly defines the captivating, everchanging, and good-use-of-everyone’s-time entity that is the internet.
Right now, we’ve got Darthmatic Chipmunk, Embarrassed Chipmunk, the very meta Undramatic Chipmunk, and, because it’s impossible not to laugh at olde timey things, the Curses! Chimpunk. Plus, if you want to relive this fad for the rest of eternity, there’s even a Dramatic Chipmunk t-shirt, which looks a little more like a walrus with a lion’s mane than the original, but I’m sure you can get the point across with less than a sentence of explaining it.
When a five second video is this captivating, where do we go from here?? Will comedy forever be limited to either things that are 1-4 seconds long or other parodies of the Dramatic Chipmunk? (My prediction: Yes.) Regardless, I still stand by my theory that not all of these videos are actually made by people, but merely willed into existence by the internet, and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.






