Inshallah They Find Him
When I started using Twitter more than eleven years ago there was a little star button that turned a golden yellow when you pressed it. This feature was called a “favorite.” I took “faving” a tweet literally and only pressed the little star when I really thought that tweet was among my favorite tweets I had ever seen.
When Twitter changed the “fave” represented by a gold star to a “like” represented by a red heart, I changed my button-pressing rule to: if I laugh at something, I have to like it. It doesn’t matter who tweeted it, or what it’s about, or what I think people might think of me if they see I have liked it. If it makes me laugh, I have to like it.
There is one post on Twitter that I have liked, I imagine, dozens of times. You have probably seen it. It’s a photo of a nine-and-a-half-by-eleven white printer-paper flyer tacked into a cork-board in a flat glass case on a wall. The flyer reads HALAL FAMILY MOVIE NIGHT in a black all-caps serif font at the top. Below that is a wavy banner in WordArt: a rainbow sans-serif spells out Finding Nemo 2, the letters casting a 50% gray shadow behind themselves. Below that sits a ClipArt image of a mischievous-looking clownfish in profile, surrounded by a few little blue circles that look like soap bubbles. Below that, the pièce de résistance: in a bolded and italicized serif font, the phrase “Inshallah they find him.”
Every few months for what feels like the last few years, someone tweets this photo out with the caption “Inshallah they find him.” The phrase is funny because of its borrowed grammar, and it’s funny because the movie is Finding Nemo 2, the assumption in the phrase being that even after a full-length feature they (whoever “they” are) are still looking for Nemo. And it’s funny because you don’t expect it. The cherry on top of the nonsense-borderline-surrealist sundae that is the whole flyer are the bubbles around the clownfish. This phrase is just extra.
That element of surprise made me cry with laughter the first time I saw the image. I don’t laugh at it anymore, but I like (as in, I press the heart button) this image every time it comes across my feed. I don’t question it. I don’t take time to be smug — oh, I’ve already seen it, this is old news, who cares, it’s not funny anymore — I just go TAP with my right index finger and the little heart changes from a gray outline to a filled-in red thing. I sit there and I look at the caption and I think, fuck that is funny, even though I am not laughing, even though I am not surprised anymore, even though I’ve seen it so many times that I can describe the glare on the glass case from memory. I tap the little heart, I affirm what I once felt, I hope to feel it again. Inshallah.
