If you ever dare to venture away from the safe, culturally-understandable confines of Facebook and take a look into the world of online drama, I promise you will be grateful for the big, steaming pile of lulz available to you at the click of a button almost every day.

What is lulz? Lulz of course comes from the acronym lol, meaning “laugh out loud”. While lol is usually read as “ell-oh-ell”, pronounced as a word you get “lawl” or “lul”. On the Internet, where everything is a misspelled, bastardization of the English language, the pluralization of this term becomes lulz.

Lulz is most commonly used in the expression “I did it for the lulz”. This usually refers to deliberate trolling behavior intended to harass Internet users for the amusement of others. World of Warcraft once became Internet-known for this, when a man and a woman fell in love on the game, and after many quests and creating a guild together the man asked the woman to marry him. She agreed, but the night before she planned to fly out to see him in real life for the first time, she confessed to him that she was really a man, and their entire relationship was a sham. Devastated, the man asked why someone would do something so terrible as this, and his answer was only “I did it for the lulz”.*

Lulz isn’t limited to deceitful acts of trolling. Lulz can commonly be found all over the Internet, most commonly on Anime/Furry art forums or in the blogs of pre-pubescent ‘emo’ girls. Drama_Awesome, a livejournal community, posts weekly (if not daily) updates regarding the various drama to be found on the ‘net and invites its members to partake in the lulz. Most of the drama presented in this community comes from forum members of various sites who begin a debate about whatever but later divulge into a trainwreck of insults, correcting each others’ typos and grammatical errors and accusing each other of the same hypocrisy they practice in their posting (also referred to as saying “NO U”, but this and other expressions will be discussed in a later blog). As such incidents suggest, lulz is commonly found among Internet users who overextend what limited knowledge they have and show themselves for the ignorant lulz-factories they are.

Lulz is also not limited to events on the Internet. For example, the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith has generated intense amount of lulz from a variety of sites, many pulling up as many unflattering pictures of her as possible and speculating over the many reasons, real or otherwise, why she might have died. However, it should be noted that as an Internet concept, lulz can only be used and discussed on the Internet. Also, lulz that occurs on the Internet is always greater than lulz that happens in real life. Even Micheal Richard’s tirrade on “n****rs” did not generate the amount of online lulz that many an Internet phenomenon has. How Internet phenomenons develop and how they generate lulz will also be discussed in a later blog, so fear not if you are a bit confused.

Is lulz insenstive? Mean? Perhaps. What people find funny in real life is often filtered through a veil of what society deems socially acceptable or not. Even among your group of close friends, there are often some things you just don’t joke about for the fear or courtesy of offending someone over something personal. But on the Internet, other than what rules a webmaster or server host lays down for a particular site, its users are free to discuss whatever they want and joke about whatever they want. Perhaps it is for this exact reason that users online will push the limits of humor and overstep any social boundaries, often by using racist and sexist jokes in the most inappropriate situations. On the Internet, where there is almost always a safe and non-visual distance between the harmer and the one harmed, lulzing over every bit of harsh (yet arguably funny) information is more acceptible. Thus, lulz was born on the Internet, and on the Internet it shall remain.

People often ask me why I deleted my Facebook account and yet manage to spend hours on end surfing the ‘net and typing away. I’m doing it for the lulz. This is probably difficult if not impossible for some of you, who only get your lulz from the likes of Facebook and CollegeHumor, to understand, but my hope with my portion of this blog is to enlighten the campus at large about the inner goings-on of the Internet and the many subcultures that form as a result. My hope is to share all the lulz the Internet has to offer so that one day you’ll be doing it for the lulz too.

Stay tuned for my next post when I’ll be discussing memes.

*This, and much of the other information on lulz presented in this article, was found on the Internet culture documentation site (warning: not safe for work) EncyclopediaDramatica.com. Information on this site is not always permanent, as the site is a wiki open for any editing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Internet culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.