Endless Thread - Is 'Kilroy Was Here' the original meme?

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

We often think of memes as living solely online. But the term “meme” was coined in the 1970s -- before the birth of the internet -- by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And, more surprisingly, the image that's often considered to "the first meme" appeared as early as the 1940s.  A figure with a bulbous head and sausage fingers, peering over a wall, mysteriously popped up all over the globe during World War II, accompanied with three simple words: “Kilroy Was Here.” The phrase’s original meaning may come from the belly of warships, but what it came to represent bears many characteristics of a true-blue internet meme. In the first episode of our meme series, we tell the story of where "Kilroy Was Here" came from, how it spread, and what it tells us about the essence of memes. 

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. A few years ago, a man named Phil Edwards was looking for a secret treasure from World War II, even though he felt no real deep connection to World War II. It was something he was doing for work. Phil's work? I feel like a certain set of people you are so famous for. You know what I mean?

Like, they're like, oh my God, like, you make the explainers. You make the Vox explainers. A lot of people talk about Bitcoin is a new kind of... There's a two-letter word that we hear everywhere. Vaccines teach your immune system how to respond to a threat. And traditionally... Yep. Phil makes those explainer videos for Vox.

But his official title? I'm very proud that I got ephemera correspondent on my business cards. Phil's search for this secret treasure was for a video he was making, about something that was a... in World War II, even though it still has echoes all over today's world, the digital world and the real world. I had just moved to Washington, D.C., and I'd heard that there was this secret hidden at the World War II Memorial. And that automatically intrigued me, because anytime there's a secret, I want to hunt it down and see what it is. And so I walked down to the World War II Memorial, and it's this very strong.

serious, beautiful monument. Can you remind us what it looks like? It's a set of columns arranged in the circle, and they're at the other end of the National Mall, opposite the Lincoln Memorial and near the Washington Monument. And so it's very imposing these tall stone columns, and they all have labels of different states on them, representing everyone who went and fought and died in World War II. It's very beautiful, but I'd heard that there. there was this secret thing hidden around the corner.

And so I go, I'm looking for it, I don't see it. The it here was not the memorial itself. Phil didn't feel much of a connection to that. It felt too abstract. But this secret treasure he was looking for, that is what drew him to this monument and what moved him once he found it. And I finally peek around and over a fence just beyond it,

kind of hidden in the corner, is a little draw. And it's of a man peeking over a wall. His giant nose is kind of hanging over it. And under it, it says, Kilroy was here. Kilroy was here. Hiding in plain sight on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., a little image with text staring back at him.

The eyes are basically usually two dots. In some cases, they're drawn differently. But two dots, and then it's just a line drawing. The line drawing is extremely spare. It's this little bald head with beady eyes and a big droopy nose and two sets of little fingers, all peering over a horizontal line that looks like a wall. Even though it's meant to feel like a secret, it's not. The image and text is literally carved into the stone of this memorial.

This was part of the design of the monument from the beginning, and I was really interested in how something so ephemeral as this graffiti could make it onto a monument and actually endure to be like a part of World War II history. This graffiti was part of World War II history because during the war, this little doodle wasn't just here.

I mean, he ends up everywhere. Everywhere as in all over the globe. And yet, for a long time, nobody knew why, where it came from. It was just this recurring, mysterious piece of graffiti. Sometimes the text changed, changed. There were different versions of the image, but the basic building blocks were always recognizable. And this guy, Phil, the ephemera correspondent for Vox, he's been slightly obsessed

ever since he found out about it. Honestly, so have we, because it represents what many believe to be the first example of something, something that is really common decades later, in a totally different digital context. What did you start to learn about this? figure? I guess what I learned is that it was really similar to a modern meme in a lot of key ways where like the origins are murky in the beginning and then it's everywhere. There are different variations country by country. And then eventually even places like Hollywood are trying to capitalize on this meme and make it into a bigger thing. So there's just so many different similarities to the way that memes kind of churned through the culture today.

I'm Amory Sievertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. And once again, we are asking you to listen to Endless Thread. Which is coming back to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. How do you do, fellow kids? We arrive with a new set of stories in hand about something that has become a building block of the internet as we now experience it. Jared, back to you. I can't have cheeseburger for 400. Something that might actually be a lot more important than we realize, because it's having a fundamental impact on how we as humans communicate. But the ever given is given us a tidal wave of glorious means. And that communication has power to impact our personal lives

and even define our recent collective lived experience. This is fine. And maybe change the course of history in big ways and small. This one's just from yesterday on David, Duke's Twitter feed. Donald Trump kissing Pepe the Frog, the little white supremacist baby signifier. Memes, we are talking, of course, about memes. And today, we want to start with Kilroy, which 80 years later is for people like Phil, a secret treasure with mysterious origins, mysterious for us, and even for the people who were around during its meteoric rise in popular

culture. Kilroy also has a record of mutation, of changing and more. over time with different levels of importance and layers of meaning. So we're going to learn more about Kilroy. And dang it, we're going to figure out where he came from and why he exists. Because he is arguably the first real meme. But what do we mean when we say meme? These days, we usually mean a photo, sometimes a screen grab from a video, but a still image with that bold white font on it.

Impact font, baby. And that image can be anything. It can be SpongeBob Squarepants. And often is... It can be a puppet. It can be the fist of an anthropomorphic cartoon art vark named Arthur. Or a kid swinging a stick in his garage pretending to be Darth Mall or actual Star Wars characters, Anakin and Padmay.

One of my personal favorites. The term meme was coined by an evolutionary biologist in the 1970s named Richard Dawkins. Remember that name because you're probably going to hear it more than once. Richard Dawkins, see? But even though the term is itself 40 years old, memes are still pretty hard to define, even by the experts. And we talked to several experts. What do you call more than two meme experts?

Is that a meme chorus? Memo-o-o-me-team? Mem-team? Anyway, we got one. A group of academics and memeographers who think about, write about, eat, sleep, and breathe memes. Mem chorus. I like that. Should we meme chorus it up, Amory?

Oh, yeah. Ah. A meme is a unit of culture. A meme is an idea that spreads from person to person. A style of communication that is created with awareness. Other interviews. I like that. But memes could be viral slogans.

A way to exist in the world. You'll get to know these choruses. members throughout our meme series. People like Don Caldwell, the editor-in-chief of the popular site, know your meme. You think that memes are bigger than the internet. So what's like, what's an example of memes that came before? With memes that came before the internet, there's a, there's a really old meme that was called Kilroy was here.

And that just spread through, you know, people seeing the symbol of this Kilroy character and kept replicating it by drawing it elsewhere. And that really resembles the way that a lot of internet memes work. Okay, so taking the broad strokes from our meme chorus, we know that Kilroy was here, the words, and the image of the guy with the nose peeking over the wall was arguably a meme in part because it spread not through any truly unified campaign. It wasn't war propaganda.

It was a meme because it just seems to have spread organically. One could even say virally. And even before people were using going viral like we do, a New York Times article from the 1940s described Kilroy was here as a contagious phrase. And this contagion spread fast. Kilroy was popping up everywhere during World War II. Kilroy was in Okinawa. Kilroy was in Casablanca.

Kilroy was in Sicily. He's everywhere that people are fighting because there's, this original seed of the meme, but then very quickly, soldiers and others who are serving in the war take on this idea of Kilroy as this sort of mythical figure that has been literally everywhere. So, you know, they start scrolling it in the most unusual places that they can find. So let's say somebody is finding a cottage in France and they sneak up to a rafter. They might scroll it there, just on the off chance that somebody else would find it. The Kilroy Doodle was super easy to draw. Straight horizontal line, easy, and then the fingers

sticking over it, totally cartoonish, the nose, too. It's sort of like if a marshmallow took human form. And it would have to be easy to draw, right? For it to spread by regular GIs, who for some reason are taking time out of their days, which for many of these young soldiers are filled with death and fear in unfamiliar places with no trip home in sight, they're picking up this piece of charcoal from the campfire or pulling out a crayon and doodling this kind of odd, funny little guy. Looking back at this phenomenon, the words in the meme itself are a non-sequitur. There's no clear meaning or message at first blush. In fact, just the random appearance of it was the joke, a silly random image for a dead serious era. Something recognized.

in a world that was anything but. Kilroy's origin definitely seems to be among the Allied forces. But beyond that, it was super vague. Kilroy's simplicity as an image and the silly vague quality of the image both became superpowers. Turns out, vagueness is part of what makes a lot of memes travel into the atmosphere, the ether, and stay there. Memcore's time...

Ah. Great memes invite you to remix them, One of the elements that go with longevity and so on is, you know, how much can a meme get taken out of context and still work? The context does collapse over time. As the Kilroy Doodle spread, it did something else that's really common among memes that take off. It morphed, evolved. As soldiers deploying all over the world adopted Kilroy, they remixed him to reflect their own experiences. This, of course, also makes it even harder to.

to figure out exactly where the doodle and phrase we recognize now came from. In England, there was this little meme called Mr. Chad, and he looks basically just like Kilroy does. But instead of saying Kilroy was here, he would kind of have complaints about his rations written underneath. I don't know. So, like, Mr. Chad would say, like, what? No, you know, no meat? or no coffee, you know, or something like that underneath him. But the accent that I'm giving him is because when I've read about it,

the what is kind of spelled W-O-T. So I feel like, you know, I feel like that's the way you have to read that. No, you did great. Yeah. Well. Yeah, yeah. Kilroy got folded into the legends that Allied forces told themselves and each other about their advances in the war.

There are stories that Stalin would be going to the, bathroom at the Boston Conference. And then he would see Kilroy was here, scrawled on the bathroom wall and think that it was some American agent that was out to get him. There were rumors that Hitler ran into it, you know, when he was like walking down the street somewhere. I don't know if any of these are true, but they're good stories. Anytime something like this enters the mainstream so thoroughly, someone is going to try to capitalize on it, right? Today we see brands diving in on popular memes to pretty mixed results. And this happened with Kilroy, too. Is there a creepy recorded song that makes no real

sense named Kilroy was here? Why, yes. Yes, there is. It's a duet between a woman who is singing in a really weird, Betty Boop-like voice, ultra falsetto, and then a guy who is singing in a totally goofy version of Kilroy. Can you give us a stanza? All I remember right now is Kilroy's refrain. He says, I'm Kilroy. Just like that. Did Hollywood get a piece of Kilroy? You know they did. A movie of the same name

about a hapless veteran named John J. Kilroy who just can't catch a break because, well, he's famous. Kilroy was here. Kilroy was there. Mr. Kilroy. Would you mind autographing this potato for me? How about a platinum-selling-selling rock opera album

by the band Sticks, featuring Yes, the 1983 synthesizer-packed concept album this song was on was called Kilroy was here. Or perhaps you're more partial to the outcast song, Jazzy Bell, which has Andre 3000 referencing the figure's peering pose. Over the years I've been up on my toes

And yes, I sing things like Kidroy Shit boy, because them folks might thank you soft talking about. Ninety-Nineal classic. Maybe a slightly more recent reference would be the horror anthology by Kevin Smith called, yes. Kilroy was here. Haven't seen it. Don't know why it's called that.

Looks pretty bad, to be honest. So everyone eventually knew that, generally speaking, Kilroy was here. But what does it mean? And where did it come from? The moment you have probably been waiting for, Amory, drum roll. We found out. We totally found out.

And we're going to tell you in one minute. And I'll work on rolling my R's. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do all. also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey.

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Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. There is something delicious about knowing the origin of a meme.

Delicious is not the word. I'd use, but I think I know what you mean. Right? Well, it's definitely true that part of the point of memes, as we know them, is to basically become applicable in lots and lots and lots of different scenarios, to be divorced from their original context. Knowing the original context itself is in its own right a kind of badge of honor. It's like the primary layer of this form of communication that has become all about multiple layers. Determining the origin of an internet meme is one thing. There's a digital train. Kylroy? Totally different beast, because it's pre-internet, and also organic and chaotic in how it morphed over time,

which is part of why it's been hard to figure out where it came from. Without our massive, catalogable, searchable, machine-readable trove of information, you can't really do a reverse image search. In fact, the only way we have a pretty good idea of who the real Kilroy was is the radio. Just saying. It's true. Eventually, Kilroy graffiti scrawled all over the world, turned into legends about spooking stall in a stall, into a hit single, a feature-length film,

became popular enough that someone started asking, where the hell did this thing come from? Specifically, someone at what was called at the time the American Transit Association, which started a contest on the radio in 1946 to find the real Kilroy. And in December of that, year, they did. Supposedly, a guy named James J. Kilroy stepped forward, though our Kilroy Vox

Explaner video guy, Phil, was not so sure. Along with Kilroy and the British version, Mr. Chad, there were these other versions from Australia, and they seemed to come from World War I. They were different, though. One was called Smoh and was written as Smoh was here. Another was called foo. Foo was here. F O was apparently a bit more of a mischievous character, and the name may have stood for forward operating officer. It's all pretty thin on the details, but these forms, just the phrase, no drawing, supposedly came before Kilroy. So this is one of the reasons that I'm not quite willing to go all in on James J. Kilroy being Kilroy. I'm like 80% of the way there, but just not a full 100%. You know who is 100% though?

a couple of people in our own backyard. That's confirmed. That's confirmed. That's confirmed. That happened right here in Quincy. That's a fact. That was where it originated. A while back, Amory and I went to the spot where the original Kilroy first popped up. Check, check, check. Emery was running the recording kit. We were on the waterfront in Boston, Quincy, technically.

And we are in like a huge shipyard that I've never been to, but it's like so industrial. Like, so industrial, there is a power station, silos, piers. Look, that says blue-fin robotics. We're looking for a battleship, and it is not hard to find. The USS Salem is very majestic. I mean, it looks ready for battle. It's got... I mean, okay.

It looks like it's been parked for a very long time. It's been parked for a very long time, but look at all those... Lots of guns. Look at all that can. The U.S.S. Salem is technically not a battleship, but a heavy cruiser commissioned in the 1940s, and we are boarding her, gingerly, via gangplank. I'm just hoping we're allowed to just walk up, right? Well, they'll probably shoot us.

This very steep ramp. If they point one of the cannons at us, we'll know. We didn't get cannoned, got up the gangplank of this heavy cruiser to find the true origin of this secret treasure. the original meme that went around the world. We made it all the way into the Admiral's Cabin. That's a little rich for my blood, but I'll take it. We were hoping to make it to the Admiral's Cabin. We got to know Margaret LaForest,

president of the board of directors at the U.S. Naval Shipbuilding Museum, aka the USS Salem, which has been parked at this pier since 1994. Never got a parking ticket either. Got to be a record for Boston. Also with us is an old-timer named Leo, who worked right here in the Quincy shipyard 60 years ago after serving in the military. Today, he is a volunteer at the museum, who wears a black veteran's hat over a hard-scrabble New Englander face

with a hard-scrabble New Englander sound. I was a ship-fitter. What's a ship-fitter do? Well, I actually fitted parts together. When the bottom of the basin, all you had was your blocks that the ship set on. So the first thing they brought down would be the plates. You have brackets and you attach the plates all the way along in the bottom of the basin. Leo was down in the belly of the boats, attaching the first pieces of those boat bellies together.

And back then, there were a lot of people building a lot of boats. When I was in the yard in the late 50s, there was about 6,000 people in the yard at the time. But during World War II, this yard had 30,000 men and women. One of those 30,000 people doing this work, James J. Kilroy. James Kilroy was also working in the belly of the boats, where people were welding and riveting. The riveters worked here. They worked on incentive. The more rivets you put in, the more money you got. Which led to an issue, disputes about how many rivets or welds were getting done by that group of workers. When inspectors would come through and check the riveters' work, they would scrawl proof with chalk markings.

So they didn't want to double pay them, so Kilroy would go down, and he would count the rivets. And like she just said, he'd right on the bulkhead, Kilroy was here. So they knew that he counted that compartment. But in the somewhat chaotic 30,000-person operation, some welders and riveters got smart and started wiping the chalk off. So they'd get paid for doing new work that was actually old work,

which, of course, the bosses were not too pleased about. So James Kilroy started writing his inspection note, not in chalk, but in yellow grease crayon, which was harder to erase. This was a time when warboats were flying out of the slipways of Quincy Shipyard into the ocean. As Leo likes to say, more tonnage than any shipyard in the country. That tonnage was covered in one statement, which you already know. And partly because these ships were going out of the shipyard so fast, they didn't have time for finishing touches. Some of these compartments never got painted. They were building the ship so fast.

The guys are laying in their bunks, and they see Kilroy was here. At this point, it was just the words. No little guy peeking over the wall yet. Margaret says that's where the confusion comes in. The Kilroy was here, that line, the GIs taking that phrase, that originated here. What I understand kind of the controversy about was, was Kilroy using the character or the Chad, and that then getting added to the Kilroy, did that part originate here?

So the words it originated here, but the image of the person looking over the wall was later, I believe later at it. Okay, we grant you that Margaret might not sound too sure there, but she speaks with some authority, because she's been speaking about Kilroy for a long time. Back in middle school, her class did a bunch of oral histories on the shipyard as it was closing, and they played on local public access TV. So if you would like to tune into QATV and into their archives, you can see my great 80s hair.

Oh, yes, Margaret. We would and we did. How long did your father work in the shipyard? He went to work in the shipyard in 1941. As a matter of fact, a couple days before Pearl Harbor, before the Japanese farm, Pearl Harbor. Margaret and her classmates interviewed Kathy Kilroy Needham, James's daughter. Could you tell us any stories? Well, the Kilroy was his story was the biggest story that I knew, because I was only four when he won a streetcar for being the original Kilroy. And all kinds of reporters and photographers and all were there.

And there was no television at that time. So it's a big newspaper event, really. You heard that right. The radio contest run by the American Transit Association gave James Kilroy a full-sized street. car as a prize when they recognized him as the original Kilroy. Alas, the original isn't around anymore. But he did leave nine little Kilroy's behind, including Kathy. Some of his coworkers from the shipyard remember him too.

For some reason or rather, he started writing, wherever he had done anywhere, he'd write, Kilroy was here. And the word spread around all over the yard. And Kilroy, I don't mean in a disparaging way, but he was a character. And I have seen his yellow paint. He painted up. Gilroy was here. According to newspaper coverage at the time, 14,000 workers from the Quincy Shipyard alone got into the ships they built and went to war,

which helps explain the spread of the meme, too. It wasn't just randos who saw it in the boats. There might have been people who knew the origin and brought it with them overseas. Where it again did something a meme does, it supposedly picked up an image of the British version, Chad. So the doodle is really a composite, an image with new text representing the literal combination of allies fighting against the Nazis.

And this is where Kilroy started taking on more meaning. It was still this absurd little message, scrawled all over the place randomly, but it also told you something about where you were and who had been there before you. Leo says that's important. So once they got overseas in Europe, especially the army, if they took a town in Germany, they'd write on the buildings, Kilroy was here. So the next platoon knew that the Americans were already through that town, and they felt a little safer because Kilroy was already here.

Phil Edwards from Vox mentioned this too. You know, I can imagine if you had been hiking in a country you didn't know for two and a half days, thinking that you're really far from home and you don't know the language, and then suddenly you peer underneath a girder of a bridge, and you see Kilroy was here. I can imagine that would be comforting and really unsettling at the same time. You know, Kilroy almost becomes this like omniscient type figure if he's in enough places. Leo, can I ask you how old you are?

I'll be 87 in August. So you're a veteran? Korea. So what does Kilroy was here mean to you? Well, I think it turned into a good image because the GIs took advantage of Kilroy was here. I just like to preserve some of American history. history. I think we're too much of a throwaway society today. I was brought up in a different era. That's what I, that's about all I can tell you really.

In Leo's day, preserving something meant erecting a museum, a monument. In the digital age, we preserve ideas and images in a different way, often in meme format. And however we preserve ideas, preserving the mundane, helps us understand the realities of regular people. If you think about ancient civilizations, most of what we have left from them are, you know, these visual artworks, right? It might become the same if many years from now everything that was left from us was, you know, Twitter. Meme chorus member John Lucas Strangini there. And oh, please, Lord, don't let Twitter be the thing people look back on to understand this time. Unless it is a look at what us plebs have to say about what's.

going on. Our ephemera expert Phil, whose title alone proves he's been brought up in a different era than Leo the shipfitter, has something similar to say about Kilroy. For him, Kilroy is this super unique meme from before the internet that's been preserved almost as a portal to the past. Personally, it's hard for me to grapple with the solemnity of memorials because I don't necessarily, I don't know, some of the things that are being memorialized are so abstract for me, like the number of people who died, it's ultimately a number for me,

and it's hard for me to understand. But the second that I see somebody's sense of humor, I suddenly understand their humanity on this whole new level. And they go from being just a statistic to being a breathing person who wanted to make a joke. Kilroy is still being meaned. It's been on TV shows, their internet communities, a subreddit even dedicated to finding instances of it in the wild, and people are still adding new versions of it.

It's its own memorial in a way, too. On the battlefield, it might have represented soldiers who had just died in the next push forward. And it is a more regular person memorial, not necessarily draped in the trappings of Belicose National Identity, something stranger. And Phil would argue, more real.

It helps me focus on the fact that these were real people. We know that real people today have flaws, they have good things and bad things about them, and they can be funny and weird and unusual and disappointing and heroic. And so to me, the fact that you get to see this meme that people were doing, it makes them people again, which is what I like about it. That right there is why we started our new series with Kilroy was here, and why we're going to keep going deep on the memes.

Oh, the humimery. By the time we're done, you're going to dream and meme. J.K. Or maybe not, because memes are changing the way we communicate in all kinds of ways. And maybe even how we think. Next week, the story of what may be the most famously ridiculed meme subject of all time. Oh, what the hell was it? Stills your keys, spends 20 minutes helping you look for them.

and his mom. When I found out that he was a meme, I was new to everything, okay, had no knowledge of the internet, no knowledge of Reddit, and I literally thought that I could rescue his reputation. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. You should 100% be joining our email list if you want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, pictures of My Bunny, or Ben's Dungeons and Dragons characters,

Do that by going to wbUR.org slash endless thread. Also, we really, really, really, really, really want to know your nomination for the best or most real or most underrated meme. Call us 857-244-0338. That is 857-244-0338. We look forward to hearing your meme ideas. Or you can record a voice memo, actually, and send it to Endless Thread at. WBUR.org.org. We might just dive into the meme you tell us about and we might use your voicemail in the show. Our meme series would be very hello fellow kids without the help of our meme chorus. The singers in that chorus?

Joan Donovan is research director at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. Sarah Laola teaches about digital culture and design at Coastal Carolina University. Gianluca Strangini studies online security, disinformation, and hate speech at Boston. in University. Amanda Brennan has the extremely cool title of Internet Librarian. Kinyatta Cheese co-founded the site Know Your Mem, and Don Caldwell is editor-in-chief. Please go find their work and benefit from their meme genius. Our series and our show is made by producers Nora Sacks and Dean Russell. We are co-hosted by myself, Amory Severson. And myself, Ben Brock Johnson.

This episode was edited by Maureen McMurray. Mixing in sound design by Paul Vicus. Original music composed for this episode also by Paul Vicus. Special thanks to an additional production work from Josh Swartz, Grace Tatter, Frank Hernandez, Kristen Torres, Sophie Kodner, and Rachel Carlson. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and the meat space. You know, Amory, the meat space, like the space where all the meat is, like you and me, we're meat and we're in this space. We're in the meat space. Okay. If you've got an untold history or an unsolved mystery or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up.

Email endless thread at wbUR.org. Stay cool forever.