Angry Bert

Tracking the «Bert is evil» meme by Solfrid Federley Kirkemo

Most people know Bert as the grumpy, but still quite innocent puppet from the TV-show “Sesame Street”. However, if you put “Bert” into your google search box, the first thing that’s going to pop up is a link to a website called www.bertisevil.tv. Why would this happen?

This phenomenon started in San Francisco as early as 1998, when a man named Dino Ignacio started a website where he posted pictures of Bert manipulated into different historical photos. The photos were jokes, revolving around the thought that Bert was evil, thereby the name of the project; “Bert is evil”. In these photos Bert was seen posing with people like Adolf Hitler, or placed in historical events like the crowd surrounding the shooting of John F. Kennedy. The photos also included backstories, and the project gained somewhat of a cult-like status. After a while the website became too costly for Ignacio, so he offered people to mirror-host his website. This led to a quite a few mirror-sites, which again raised the popularity and spread the meme.

The popularity of this meme reached its peak in 2001 right after the terror attacks, when a news photograph of a Bangladesh pro-bin Laden protester holding a picture of Osama bin Laden and Bert started circulating on the internet. The picture he was holding originated from Ignacio`s website, and were apparently being sold in thousands at a local store in Bangladesh, which owner was not familiar with the Sesame Street. The whole incident was seen as quite puzzling in the West, and horrified the owners of Sesame Street. They threatened to sue Ignacio, and in response to this he chose to remove this particular section from his website. They also released an official statement in response to the use of their character being used in this context;

“Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding. We’re outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner.”

As the statistics from Google Insights below show the interest for “Bert is evil” has declined quite a lot since 2004. The reason for this might be because the phenomenon itself is rather limited, and in the end it`s hard to keep a thing like this going forever. I guess people basically grew a bit tired of it, with other memes taking its place.

The “Bert is evil” phenomenon probably caught people’s attention because it was funny and also quite well-made. By combining the puppet character and real-life situations with Photoshop including short-stories it created something unique and interesting. It was also something that people could, without too much effort, participate in by creating their own “Bert is evil” photos, which in turn helped spread the meme.