Words on the page

Here’s a delightful structure of Twitter joke that is getting awfully clammy:

https://twitter.com/ashleylynch/status/839323600863678464

I haven’t done meaningful forensics on “hold my beer,” but my best guess is that the phrase was originally used as setup rather than punchline.

That’s how the Twitter account @HoldThisBeer uses it:

https://twitter.com/HoldThisBeer/status/808926452787937281

Similarly, this [BuzzFeed article](https://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/hold-my-beer?utm_term=.yc53bXlV5#.qvw3a7W9D) from 2014 uses “hold my beer” as context for foolhardy fails. That’s also how you see it used on [r/holdmybeer](https://www.reddit.com/r/holdmybeer/).

In this format, “hold my beer” is the frame, not the art.

But it’s as a punchline that “hold my beer” really comes into its own.

Here’s the generic structure:

> SPEAKER A: There’s no way to top this outrageous thing I said or did.
> SPEAKER B: Hold my beer.

Since it’s destined to die from overuse, let’s look into how it works.

**Speaker A has to be well-known — at least to the target audience.** If we don’t recognize the name, the rest of the joke won’t make sense. In some cases, a headline takes the place of Speaker A.

https://twitter.com/TheSCRLife/status/839606879517036545

**The thing Speaker A did or said needs to be plausible, with bonus points for recent.** There can’t be anything strained about the setup.

**Speaker B needs to be recognizable.** As with Speaker A, the joke only works if you know who Speaker B is. Either the speaker is already famous, or is temporarily famous because of recent events. The speaker can also be the tweeter:

https://twitter.com/IkeDavis10028/status/839295343384723457

**Speaker B either just did something foolish, or can be imagined doing something foolish.** To me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of this structure: it works both speculatively or retroactively. But like all things Twitter, the time horizon is very short. It’s hard to imagine the joke working more than a day or two after the inciting event.

When you encounter failed “hold my beer” tweets — and trust me, I [found a lot of them](https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=%22hold%20my%20beer%22&src=typd) — it’s usually because the writer missed one of these four important aspects.

## Life after beer

The carcass of a dead meme can provide home for other jokes that subvert the expected payoff:

https://twitter.com/TNeenan/status/824708467302752257

And it’s worth paying attention to the variant forms that continue to chug along, such as “hold my drink” and “hold my earrings.”

In the end, I think “hold my beer” has been a great joke structure for a time that feels bonkers. Every day as we scroll through Twitter, we silently ask ourselves, “Wow, could it get any crazier?”

*Hold my beer.*