A few years ago (back in 1997) I heard the “Star Wars Day” joke. I can’t remember where I heard it, but I thought it was great. That year, on the 4th May, I passed the joke on and told everyone I knew that it was Star Wars Day. When they asked me what I meant, I replied “May the Fourth Be With You!” and laughed like an anarchic fool.
The year after, in about 1998, it was no longer a new joke to me. I’d heard it and re-told it myself last year. In 1998 I heard other people saying it. In 1997 I felt like a maverick, firing out the new Star Wars joke to all and sundry after adding it to my jokey repertoire, whereas in 1998 it felt old.
So, over the last 14 years, I must have heard this same Star Wars joke every single year. So many people have said it to me over this time as the joke had obviously spread far and wide. I’ve actually got a little bored of hearing it.
Nowadays, even when I start chats about other things, people managed to crow-bar the Star Wars joke in.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I felt it was time to create a new one.
It occured to me that there was no way any joke I could write could better the May the Fourth joke. It was just too established. I started to think of other Star Wars puns that could be used as references to dates near to May 4th.
The day after the 4th was (obviously) May the Fifth, and the closest Star Warsy rhyme I could think of for that was was Sith. Sith is a really quite Star Warsy word indeed. Out of the ideas I had, (and there weren’t actually that many,) I liked “Revenge Of The Fifth” the most. So on the 1st of May, and without sharing my only real idea, I asked the people in the world of Twitter what their opinion was.
“Revenge Of The Fifth” was suggested by independent people who didn’t already know the idea I’d had. It must be a good one!
And so the day after Star Wars day, on the 5th May, I unleashed my new Star Wars joke via Twitter.
It got one ReTweet.
So I mentioned it an hour or so later, and it got a few more.
In total I mentioned it 9 times in one day, and over the course of the day all these lovely people all RT’d it.
In total these people had over ten thousand followers, which means that my joke suddenly went from having an audience of 1400 (my own follower numbers) to having an audience of ten thousand. But was that enough to make it popular?
I wasn’t sure. I felt it needed another boost. That evening I got in touch with a radio station and told them to remind people that today was Star Wars Day Episode 2 : Revenge of the Fifth.
They did!
Click here to hear the radio clip.
So with an audience of tens of thousands on Twitter and an audience of radio listeners, I was happy.
Later that night I saw a friend on Facebook set their status to “Star Wars Day : Revenge Of The Fifth!” Now I hadn’t put anything about it on Facebook, mainly because I don’t like it, and so the fact that it appeared on there MUST mean that the joke had been passed around quite a lot. I asked then where they had heard the joke.
My joke had appeared on Twitter, on Facebook and on the Radio. This MUST be enough to qualify it as a good one!
Today, on 9th May, I Googled “Star Wars Day Revenge of the Fifth” All of the results were for pages on sites with dates and times after my original post. The first time I used the joke in full was on the 4th May: https://twitter.com/#!/80sNostalgia/status/198366986386939904
Have I actually invented a joke?!?
So remember next year, after you’ve all said your traditional Star Wars Day joke on the 4th May, the day after is now officially…