By: Ella D’Auria
A whopping 67% of humans have never tried pizza. In fact, 6 in every 7 have reported that they’d pick pasta over pizza any day. When asked to rate pizza, the average adult’s answer was a 6 or a 7 on a scale out of ten.
If you find yourself itching to lift your hands up and down like a balance scale, trying to smooth out your smug grin, or shouting “six seven!” with unabashed enthusiasm: congratulations—you’ve officially been conditioned by the Internet’s least impressive Pavlov experiment. The absolute chaos that the “6-7” meme has created is very real. What started as a comical inside joke has now become emblematic of how dry and spiritless our sense of humor has become.
The cultural phenomenon’s origins are contentious: some say it was born from the height of basketball player LaMelo Ball, while others swear it comes from the rap song Doot Doot by Skrilla. Either way, the only laughable thing is our tendency to mindlessly perpetuate the meme—it’s a human construct that everyone decides to subscribe to…because?
Before I get all sanctimonious on you, I will humbly admit that I, too, have the brainworm that indicates terminal social media exposure squirming around in my head. I’ve plagued my poor physics and math teacher more times than I’d like to admit, but once I caught that look in their eyes—you know, the one that says, “I went to grad school for this?”—I realized the bit had run its course.
At first, I thought it was clever, and I agree it’s fun to be in on these things. But now that my classmates and I can’t find the angle complementary to 23 degrees, nor say the year the Townshend Acts were passed without choking back a giggle, I think it’s safe to conclude that the only thing this meme sums up to, aside from 13, is one big headache.
I’m all in for harmless fun and a good laugh here and there. My issue is that, at this point, this meme has become robotic and meaningless; “6-7” doesn’t have the element of witty wordplay or timing that it used to. Jokes are funny most often because the setup creates an expectation, and the punchline presents an incongruity. But “6-7” doesn’t subvert our expectations; it doesn’t require thinking to make you laugh—it just makes us flinch. Our response to it has become no better than Pavlov’s salivating dogs. When something around us presents the misfortune of ringing that mental bell, we are conditioned to twitch and grin. It’s less a joke and more a reflex—it’s just not funny anymore. At its best, the 6-7 joke is performative, and at its worst, it’s exhausting.
The overuse attests to a larger theme beyond personal annoyance. Humor spreads reflexively rather than cleverly. We are forming a participation-over-creativity culture; people feel obligated to perpetuate the joke. The worst part is that it’s ruining the way we communicate: our humor reflects our new cultural hypnosis; we employ our reflexes instead of natural wit and charisma. In the most literal sense of the colloquial term, 6-7 is “brainrot.”
So the next time you hear everyone’s favorite line in Doot Doot by Skrilla, pause and reconsider before you surrender your self-control and wit to the tyranny of two arbitrary numbers. Culture only survives when we choose creativity over conditioning. It’s harmless fun today, but I’d urge you not to count on mindless brainrot as the foundation of your humor. We are becoming obedient vessels of empty humor, and soon we’ll be wagging our tails at whatever viral nonsense comes next.
