There’s no question that the internet is full of facepalm-worthy posts. With fake news running rampant and terrible photoshop jobs all over social media, it’s not hard to find something that makes you question how it ended up online in the first place. And no one knows that better than the members of the Facepalm subreddit. This community, which was created in August 2009, has amassed an incredible 7.4 million members who love calling out the most frustrating and disappointing moments the world has ever seen.
While we’re all familiar with the experience of seeing something that makes us want to facepalm, it was not until relatively recently that this word made its way into dictionaries. According to Merriam-Webster, the earliest known use of the word ‘facepalm’ was found in a Google Group in 1996. “Christie facepalmed. ‘Well, her hair was red this morning, right? It's blonde now. You figure it out.’” Since then, however, the term has taken on many lives as not only a verb, but also a noun, adjective and interjection. It also finally made its way into the dictionary in 2017.
To learn more about the topic of facepalming from an expert, we reached out to Beowulf Rochlen, host of the Facepalm America podcast, who was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda about what inspired him to start his show. "I thought there needed to be a podcast that dealt with both issues in the news and with the many, many goofy things Americans are inclined to do," Beowulf shared. "So I launched a show on which I interview guests, chat with listeners, and discuss issues such as 'why do Americans have avocado anxiety?' and 'why is there a Speaker of the Pub in Washington DC?'"
We were also curious why the host thinks it's important to discuss these topics. "There’s a lot of serious news out there," he noted. "And while I don’t avoid that, I think that in order to process the negative, people need something that will make them laugh and keep them engaged with the world around them. Fortunately, Americans are experts at providing facepalm-worthy moments to laugh at, such as US Senators who declare they 'don’t want reality' and Florida sheriffs who send baby pacifiers to suspects."
When it comes to how Beowulf decides what to discuss on Facepalm America, he told Bored Panda that he has no shortage of inspiration. "I find it difficult to turn on my phone or laptop and read the news without encountering a story that makes me want to bury my face in my hand in order to avert my eyes from the silliness and stupidity being described," he shared.
"But I filter through the news every day to find stories every day that seem to me to strike the right balance of informative and inane. While I suppose I should be used this kind of thing by now, I was taken aback by a story that outlined a new law that would allow 14-year-olds to be bartenders and another in which San Francisco was proposing to use killer robots in their city," the host continued.
#6 Ironic Idiots
We also asked Beowulf if he believes Americans are particularly prone to doing facepalm-worthy things. "When it comes to facepalmery, I think that America is still number one," he noted. "But that doesn’t mean other countries are giving up. Many people I know are proponents of American exceptionalism when it comes to being facepalm-worthy. But I think that all people around the world are created equal when it comes to their potential for engaging in behavior that just leaves you shaking your head."
If you're interested in listening to some great, facepalm-worthy content, be sure to check out Beowulf's show Facepalm America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more information or to connect with the show, you can find their website right here!
#9 "Don't Be Gay"
Due to how popular facepalming has become, it’s not hard to find compilations online of the most facepalm-worthy moments CEOs, Donald Trump, and celebrities are guilty of. And while everyone is capable of having a ditzy moment or making a stupid mistake every now and then, all of these facepalm worthy moments do beg the question: are people getting dumber? Well, according to new research from the United States, it appears that Americans actually might be. Studies analyzing the IQs of citizens in the US have found that their intelligence scores in logic and vocabulary, visual problem solving and analogies, and computational and mathematical abilities have declined in recent years.
Some proposed explanations for America’s declining intelligence are unhealthy modern diets, increasingly trashy media or a decrease in the quality of education systems and the prevalence of reading, Jessica Stillman at Inc. explains. But she notes that it’s impossible to know exactly what caused the decline in IQ scores, it might even be a technical detail of the IQ tests themselves, meaning we have no reason to fear that we’re getting dumber. “IQ tests generally measure crystallized intelligence more, so changes in schooling that de-emphasize memorization might be driving a decline in scores,” Stillman writes. “If this explanation is true, students remain as smart as ever (just way more reliant on Google).”
#13 Foreign Sounding Name = Must Be Immigrant = Must Suck At English. Logic 101
While not every post on this list features exclusively online interactions, many of them do. And there’s a chance that many of us just say dumber things online than we would in real life. According to a piece Rich Duncan wrote for The New York Times, the internet seems to amplify the stupid things that we do and say. “You can get a perfect score on your SATs and it will barely register in a world of 200 million tweets a day. But give just one stupid answer in a beauty pageant, and you’ll be the laughingstock of the world before you have time to clear your name on the next morning’s Today show,” Duncan explains.
While some like to argue that the internet is making us stupider, as we can rely on Google to solve all of our problems and we’re often confronted with ridiculous views on the world from questionable influencers who probably shouldn’t have platforms, Brian Resnick at Vox has a more optimistic take on the issue. He claims that the internet isn’t making us stupider, but instead more humble. When we know that the answers to our questions are actually out there, a simple Google search away, we’re less likely to spew our beliefs when we’re not 100% sure they’re correct. We recognize that we might not actually know all the answers, but someone, or something, out there does.
