Cool Post Bro

Legit review still coming but this idea literally just came to me and it’s too good(?) and short(!) to not post now.

There’s a phrase on the internet called “cool story bro” that you say sarcastically to someone when they’ve told a story that you find decidedly uncool for various reasons:

It could be a wall of text too dense to be easily read on a computer (tl:dr or too long didn’t read)

It could just be stupid. (Person 1: Today, I came home and made a sandwich, Person B: Cool story bro). On the internet these kinds of cool stories also typically have poor spelling and grammar and are clearly written by children using their parent-allotted one hour of daily computer use.

It also could be an actually interesting story, or something obviously heartfelt, deep and personal. These are labeled cool stories just to be condescending, jerkish, passive-aggressive or really ironically funny. This can also be known as trolling, a fundamental internet concept far too massive to cover here.

According to the amazing website Know Your Meme, the “official” origin of “cool story bro” is this clip from Zoolander.

But circumstances today lead me to revisit the “shaggy dog story” concept (the namesake but not inspiration of those stupid Disney movies) and after some consideration, I’d like to throw out the theory that the “shaggy dog story” is the original “cool story.”

From Wikipedia

“In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded tale featuring extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents, usually resulting in a pointless or absurd punchline.”

“A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not so shaggy."

That sure sounds like a cool story bro to me.

Is writing a whole blog post about “cool story bro”, a stupid internet joke, kind of a cool story itself?

Yeah probably