Origins
“rhyming with barney” was an idea conceived while watching (and match threading) the 2018 World Cup. I was deep into Reddit at the time, and one of the things I did over the summer was to be a volunteer match threader for r/soccer during the World Cup. I got my hands dirty with some very basic CSS, inserted my own rudimentary pre-game analysis, and did a pretty good job— good enough, in fact, that I was trusted to do the France vs Croatia Final, though my favorite was definitely getting an undeserved amount of Reddit gold for doing the South Korea vs Germany post-match thread.
One of my favorite subreddits to lurk at this time was r/youtubehaiku, a community where users shared something called a “youtube haiku”: videos under 14 seconds. “Brevity is the soul of wit”, as Shakespeare would put it. It was a goldmine in the post-Vine, pre-TikTok era where short-form content was not as prevalent and many YouTube creators stretched out the lengths of their videos (as incentivized by YouTube's revenue system at the time). Nowadays, it's a little redundant given every single social media platform has their own short-form content section, but the top posts of all time are still worth a scroll (this one's my favorite).
I’ve never been a prolific contributor (posts, comments, or otherwise) on Reddit, but inspiration struck one summer night in 2018, and I posted it on r/youtubehaiku. It took off in a way I never could have imagined, and it's now become one of those “two truths and a lie” fun facts I can use. It made its way into a good few meme compilation videos, some notable react videos, and onto a (now deleted) famous playlist titled “important videos”, that was a cultural epicenter among chronically online teenagers in the late 2010s.
Some stats, for those curious: as of November 2024, "rhyming with barney" has some 2.2 million views, with 97.2% of views coming from "Playlists", whatever that means. Views were highest during May 2018 (with 139,228 views on May 27th being the peak) with a sharp decline. Nowadays, it'll average some double-digit number of views per month. Since uploading, I've wasted some 5,600 hours of human life and gained ~609 subscribers (who are surely ghosts, bots, or highly disappointed in my lack of further content).
Explanation
The humor in this video is not universal, nor is it timeless. In fact, if anything, I think it was very much of its era, and specifically of the type that the r/youtubehaiku community appreciated. It's a simple bait-and-switch: I set up an expectation by invoking a familiar nursery rhyme, and then I create a sudden discrepancy by interrupting the rhyme with a line that, while it fits the rhythmic and rhyme structure, is not the original lyric.
In this case, the nursery rhyme is “one, two, buckle my shoe”, and the discrepancy is a short clip from the Tim and Eric Show where it zooms in and Eric whispers “it's free real estate”. Using the latter as a bait-and-switch clip had been a longstanding staple in the r/youtubehaiku and meme community for years, similar to RickRolling. I can't give a definitive reason as to why my video blew up (many similar videos with the same punchline are just as highly viewed), but here's my take: the combination of weaponizing a familiar nursery rhyme, incorporating the punchline in a musically coherent sense, using a title that doesn't give the joke away, and keeping it a “true haiku”, led to people appreciating it more than they would a lazier, jumpscare-style “it's free real estate” bait-and-switch.
Legacy
I will not make a single cent off this video for a variety of reasons (not partnered, was underage, incredibly short, copyrighted material), but it's a nice thing to have done. I hope that doesn't count as my fifteen seconds, but if it did, I think it's a bit fitting for someone like me, who disproportionately weights humor in their value system.
It was fun! And that's more than enough for me when it comes to this chapter of my life.
So, after all that, here it is: rhyming with barney.