Over the long weekend, Mark Zuckerberg celebrated by grilling in his backyard. Never one to miss an opportunity for dog-fooding, he broadcast the event to his millions of followers on Facebook Live, eyeing the comment stream and responding to viewers.
At one point (4:06 in the video below) a user named Kenneth asked about “the Zucc.”
Zuck reads:
Kenneth: “Mark, give me the Zucc.” [laughter] You can follow up and tell me what that means and I’ll … I’ll try my best to do it for you. What’s the whole “zucc” thing? Z-U-C-C. I haven’t seen this before.
(The livestream this clip is from is not archived on Zuckerberg’s page, and there is some slight hitching in the feed, but the smoothness of reaction animations confirms that the footage is unaltered.)
Zuckerberg’s obliviousness regarding the Zucc is amusing for a few reasons. First, “the Zucc” is a variation on “the succ,” a meme about oral sex. It dates back to a famous 2014 Tumblr post (110,000 notes, and counting) that simply stated: “she succ me thru my boxers.” Succ, in general terms, is online slang for fellatio. “She succ me,” “get the succ,” and so on.
Here is the most famous succ image.
Boy, there’s a lot going on here. Imagine being a medieval knight, transported through time by the machinations of an evil wizard, and coming across this image. I would not want to have the job of explaining to this knight what the image means, but were I asked to do so I would tell him it is a variation on a meme called “He Will Never Get a Girlfriend,” in which an unflattering picturing and a flattering picture of the same person or thing are juxtaposed. The guy eating cereal is surprised that the undesirable person has become very desirable, and so he spits his cereal. Now the meme has been altered so that SpongeBob receives oral sex, much to the surprise of cereal man.
It’s not a huge syllabic leap from “succ” to “zucc.” On a primitive level, it is simply very funny to get one of the most influential people in the world to reference oral sex.
But “zucc” also has another meaning. Over the course of 2016, Facebook pages that fit into the zany, sometimes problematic genre of “weird Facebook” have been disappearing. The operators of those pages are not pleased, and have been taking a stand against, as it’s known, “getting zucked.”
So pages with names like “Fucc the Zucc” have been popping up, angry at Facebook taking down their meme pages and throwing a wrench in their nihilistic meme crusade. This collective movement is known as the Zuckening.
That Zuckerberg is unaware of the Zuckening illustrates either the protest’s ineffectiveness or Zuckerberg’s apathy when it comes to granular user concerns — or, probably, both.
But the trolls got him to say “the zucc” on camera, and that’s a victory in itself.
As noted, the stream in which Zuckerberg gets lightly trolled does not, for some reason, appear in his profile’s archives. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will update if we hear back.
