In the early 1990s, an unnamed vandal knocked out the exit sign on Nehal Patel’s dorm floor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The vandal replaced the busted exit sign with a hastily scrawled message: “Mr. T Ate My Balls.” The incident swept through the university like wildfire, becoming a campus-wide punchline. Pictures of Mr. T and his insatiable hunger for balls were plastered on every wall. A few years later, Nehal Patel decided to share “Mr. T Ate My Balls” with the world on a burgeoning information space called the World Wide Web and quickly, the first viral Internet meme exploded into the public conscious.
Patel’s Internet meme came into existence in May 1996 on a free webspace U of I gave its students. Patel and some friends worked tirelessly finding images of Mr. T on the Internet — which was much harder in the pre-Google Image Search days — and editing them. The website was ultimately submitted to search engines and within weeks, imitators began coming out of the woodwork.
Nehal Patel’s “Mr. T Ate My Balls” was created in the same way Internet memes are created today: a low-resolution image inelegantly edited with declarative text. The imitators — which collectively became known as “Ate My Balls“, or “AMB” — were also created in the same manner, all of them sharing a burning desire for balls. Patel’s page, the original, reached over a million page views, a staggering number at a time before AOL bombarded mailboxes with discs that would ultimately become coasters and BB gun targets.
Also, like today’s memes, AMB had a shelf-life. By the late 1990s, AMB had fallen out of favor. That did not mean, however, that the Internet meme died.
It takes a lot more than time to kill a legend.
The AMB Internet meme would occasionally resurface, even as the Internet became more sophisticated and user attention deviated toward video streaming and social media. In 2008, cartoonist Drew Fairweather declared Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern worthy of an AMB page, considering that Zimmern ate balls on his Travel Channel show more regularly than one would hope. Fairweather also created AMB pages for fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s is fitting considering that the AMB Internet meme was at the height of its popularity just as the future president was beginning his tenure in the Illinois Senate.
While the Internet meme is a dime a dozen creation these days, it has become a widely-recognizable aspect of modern digital culture. Every day, millions of social media feeds are infested with images of celebrities, the fictional characters they might portray, cats, and hundreds of other subjects, each image crudely modified with some kind of culturally relevant statement written in Impact font.
It stands to reason that none of today’s Internet memes would exist had it not been for Nehal Patel’s desire to share the product of a hilarious incident with the world, an undertaking that itself would likely never have happened had it not been for an anonymous vandal who wrote “Mr. T Ate My Balls” in place of a busted exit sign in a U of I dormitory.
