Too Many People Are Stealing This Terrible Call of Duty/Halo Joke

Boy, those young men sure do love video games, don’t they? And wouldn’t you know it, two of the biggest games of the year, Halo 4 and Black Ops II, just came out! Surely there is some pithy joke to be made here, some quick gibe about how men will be playing those games and therefore neglecting their girlfriends?

Turns out there is indeed a joke to be made. Not a very good one, but a joke. It combines Halo, Black Ops II and the “Movember” cancer-awareness movement into a comedy hat-trick:

With no shave November, Halo 4 and Black Ops 2 this month, I’m predicting teen pregnancy will be at an all time low.

Okay, kinda low-hanging fruit, but it gets the job done. But here’s the thing: It’s not just one person making this joke. It’s practically everybody. They all use the exact same language, referring to Movember as “No Shave November,” and they all refer to Black Ops II as Black Ops 2. Check it out:

There are hundreds, probably thousands more—a Twitter search of “Halo Teen Pregnancy” reveals new people stealing the joke every minute. Who made the joke first? It’s difficult to tell, but it seems possible that it was a fresh-faced young fellow named Joseph Anderson way back on November 5:

No Shave November, Halo 4, and Black Ops 2 all in one month. Teen pregnancy will be at an all time low….

— joe (@joeandyy) November 6, 2012

Of course, this sort of thing is rampant on Twitter—plenty of people make timely, RT-ready jokes and see them almost instantly co-opted by a gaggle of me-too tweeters, parody accounts, and faceless phonies.

What does this tell us about the state of Twitter? That it’s a hive of scum and villainy, where a guy can’t make an honest joke without having it ripped off by a bunch of strangers? Yeah, probably. More importantly, what does it tell us about the state of video games and teen pregnancy? Only time will tell.