Bill Cosby asks Internet to meme him; everything goes poorly

In what can only be described as a stunning lack of awareness, Bill Cosby's social media team yesterday unveiled a Cosby-themed meme generator and asked the Internet's noble denizens to go forth and make a meme of the famed Philly comedian. But, as always, we should be careful what we ask for.

Cosby's social media team, of course, was hoping for innocent memes with a family-friendly tone. Take, for example, the samples provided on the now-defunct but still cached generator site. From "Vegetables? Yuck!" to "#NOMNOMNOM I love cookies!," they're all painfully, horribly benign:

But those milquetoast, lame memes would never cut it on the Internet, especially not with news about prior rape allegations making their way back into the public eye thanks to a bit from comedian Hannibal Buress filmed here in Philly. Instead, here's what they got:

Sadly, the meme soon devolved into horribly unfunny, misogynistic rape jokes. But, still, it is illustrative of both the word about the Cosby rape allegations spreading and how much of a bubble the Cosby camp truly lives in.

After all, it's hard to imagine a person who not only uses the Internet but makes his living off of doing so recommending Cosby do something like a meme generator — especially when he's embroiled once again in rape allegations that have dogged him for years. The Internet's only course of action in that case is to pretty much give them what they asked for, whether they know exactly what that was or not.

Now, the original tweet promoting the Cosby meme generator has been deleted, and the generator itself removed from Cosby's site. The thousands of satirical, biting #CosbyMeme images, however, still are floating around Twitter. And, what's more, now that the idea is out there, there's no stopping it.

In that sense, it looks like Cosby got his wish.

[AV Club]