Lip Syncing, Mr. Krabs, and Ketamine

9/3/2023

Lip Syncing

In 2017, my best friend and I joined a lip sync competition for charity. We were unprepared and decided our song about 2 hours before the show. We performed Smells like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, and it was as cringeworthy as you would expect.

For our 2018 performance, we decided our song weeks in advance instead of hours, so that helped things a lot. We chose to perform This Grill is Not a Home from SpongeBob. If you don't know the song, it is an ironically comical moment in the show, because the normally fast-paced comedy is broken up by a very slow and dramatic song.

Mr. Krabs

We spent about a week preparing our costumes. My friend was SpongeBob, and I was Mr. Krabs. We cut up cardboard boxes into shape, and used spraypaint to decorate them.

We realized pretty early on that we needed some way to replace our hands, so my friend stuck some dowels into SpongeBob and taped some yellow gloves on the end. He also let me borrow some boxing gloves for the Mr. Krabs costume.

One important rule to mention is that the judges needed to see our lips (it was a lip sync competition, afterall). Accordingly, we crudely cut mouth holes into the cardboard.

With the costumes fully made, there were just two more steps. The first was to borrow a grill and spatula. The second was to buy a McDonald's cheeseburger.

Without a doubt, we stole the show. The audience loved our performance. Everyone we talked to afterwards said that we should have won first place, but we were ranked second to an act that involved a lot more people (mostly the popular kids, and also the daughter of the show's host). Anyway, having won a gift card to a local restaurant and the hearts of the audience, my friend and I set out to celebrate.

I talked with my friends briefly about it before doing it, but I threw the Mr. Krabs costume in an empty dumpster. I thought that would be the last time I ever saw the thing. Boy, was I wrong.

Six months later, the friend who I did the whole Lip Sync competition with texted me. He was in hysterics about what he had discovered. Through a very strange sequence of events, the Mr. Krabs costume we had crafted made it to the front page of iFunny.

Suddenly, I was on a mission. I had to know who took this picture, and what they thought of it. I made a tumblr account and went searching for the original account that had made the image. The account shown had just reblogged it, and had no actual part in posting it, so that made things quite a bit harder. But eventually I found the original poster.

It turns out that, the morning after the Lip Sync battle, the mother of one of my classmates had been approaching the school when she saw it out of the corner of her eye. She took the picture and posted it online.

Ketamine

According to KnowYourMeme , a very reputable source on meme history, the Mr. Krabs Ketamine memes didn't start until around 2019. There was even a game made in 2020 surrounding the topic of Mr. Krabs overdosing on ketamine.

From time to time, I will see the image resurface, with captions added referencing Mr. Krabs on drugs.

Friends who know me will send me screenshots when they do see them. But when I see these memes, I feel a sense of pride that, in an indirect way, I contributed to their creation.