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Speaker Of The House, Nancy Pelosi, Rickrolls America

by Will Safer on January 15, 2009 at 01:42 PM


Even if you don't agree with her politics, you must admit Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has a sense of humor. To celebrate the launch of the U.S. Congress' YouTube channels for the House and Senate, Pelosi posted a video of her cats roaming around her Capitol office, playing with her gavel, and enjoying the view. That alone works well enough for us.

That she Rickrolls us halfway through the video is the piece de résistance. It's a nice nod toward the Web 2.0, social networking, tongue-in-cheek, spoofing, smirking, online crowd that funnels easily half their energy into viewing and contributing content to such sites as FailBlog, FailDogs, I Can Has Cheez Burger, and others.

What does it mean to be Rickroll'd? It's a basic bait-and-switch gag, bouncing around the Interwebs in many, many forms. Typically a viewer or reader is provided with a link to a Web site claiming to have some important information, something relevant to the serious topic at hand. The gotcha moment comes when you're presented with the video from Rick Astley's 1987 release "Never Gonna Give You Up." The use of Rickrolling is increasing, even crossing over into real-life situations.

The House of Representatives' YouTube channel can be found at www.youtube.com/househub and the Senate's at www.youtube.com/senatehub. The White House also maintains a video welcome, although it's not quite as sophisticated as Congress'.

Welcome, Speaker Pelosi. We've been waiting for you. [From: Youtube]

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Tags: congress, Nancy Pelosi, NancyPelosi, politics, rickroll, Rickrolling, speaker of the house, SpeakerOfTheHouse, video, web 2.0, Web2.0, weird

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