{"id":218998,"date":"2025-10-17T00:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T00:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/218998\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T00:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T00:42:07","slug":"explaining-the-meme-on-season-28-premiere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/218998\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining the Meme on Season 28 Premiere"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFor those who found themselves perplexed while watching this week\u2019s season 28 premiere of South Park<\/a> <\/a>by the strange new trend at the local elementary school, where kids keep saying \u201c6, 7\u201d to their own inscrutable delight: you are not alone. Our nation\u2019s teachers, parents and one writer of recaps of a socio-political animated show were also perplexed by the trend, which had a fictionalized version of tech guru political operative Peter Thiel saying a phrase uttered by a secret South Park Elementary cult.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tExplaining exactly why this particular trend, like so many confounding memes and viral nonsense, will travel unbelievably far on the web, and elsewhere, is as easy as painting wind. And why uttering \u201c6, 7\u201d with a look of confusion, which has caught fire with so many young people nationwide, was worked into the plot of\u00a0South Park\u00a0is essentially impossible to understand, because it\u2019s unknowable. However, its origins and astronomical growth over the past few weeks are a lot easier to explain.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe phrase \u201c6, 7\u201d initially appeared in a track by rapper Skrilla, titled \u201cDoot Doot,\u201d which was released in December 2024. Months later, multiple TikTok videos used the track in clips that went viral on the platform, drilling it into the consciousness of American youth in an awe-inspiring and perhaps deeply concerning way that TikTok videos can. Included in the edit were a sports clip of Charlotte Hornets\u2019 basketball player LaMelo Ball, who stands 6 feet 7 inches tall, and another clip featuring a tween and some fellow tween basketball fans shouting the numbers while waving their palms up and down courtside at a game.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe meme at that point was out of the hands of the creators and fell to the people of the internet, a crowd that we know by now sinks low and does so quickly. And when the question was posed, what does \u201c6, 7\u201d mean, exactly? \u201cNothing,\u201d was the resounding answer that was landed upon. Don\u2019t know the answer to a math question? \u201c6, 7.\u201d Asked if you\u2019d like the chicken or the fish, but can\u2019t decide? That\u2019s a \u201c6, 7,\u201d but be sure to make a shrugging motion (surely, you Gen Xers remember this guy:\u00a0 \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af ). And so on, until teachers and parents begin to lose their freakin\u2019 minds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIs this, as the Wall Street Journal recently described it<\/a>, akin to if absurdist-existentialist philosopher Albert Camus had a TikTok, given his firm grasp of meaninglessness? Or is it a prime example of internet rot \u2014 a term used to describe the chaotic, surreal and nonsensical decay increasingly found in online culture? The phrase \u201c6, 7\u201d is one with no fixed meaning but is shorthand for confusion, repetition and an ironic detachment from logic. It\u2019s a way for younger generations to express feelings of meaninglessness, anxiety and overstimulation. Fun, but just wait until they\u2019re assigned to read The Stranger in high school.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the internet, such a placeholder for nothing will, over a period of time \u2014 and in the instance of this meme, very little time \u2014 become meaningful. That\u2019s because, as it\u2019s repeated, the masses will start treating the meme as if it\u2019s imbued with meaning. Online trends tend to start from chaos and gain momentum without explanation: For example, \u201c404 Not Found\u201d went from a nonsense phrase found of a dead-end page of the web to become a meme when placed on the image of your choice, to go on to become slang for a clueless or ineffectual person And then there\u2019s the \u201cMe when the\u201d meme, which once upon a time, occupied this space as the ultimate saying for when you don\u2019t know what to say or when you\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThese memes, of course, feel like ancient history and are in internet years \u2014 not heard or used in web communities or in real life very much or at all anymore. So for those being driven batty by \u201c6, 7,\u201d this too shall pass. But it will forever be memorialized in a South Park episode, which can\u2019t be said for any of the aforementioned memes of meaningless, so good job, Gen Z, or actually, to bridge one letter-based generation to another:\u00a0 \u201c\u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af\u00a0 6, 7.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For those who found themselves perplexed while watching this week\u2019s season 28 premiere of South Park by the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[133664,64,63,134,21300,427],"class_list":{"0":"post-218998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-6-7","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-south-park","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}