Chocolate Rain

Recording in an apartment and the YouTube upload

The song was recorded in March 2007 in an apartment in Minneapolis. The performer did everything alone and released the track without a label. The track runs 4 minutes 52 seconds.

Sources differ by one day on the upload date: the song itself appeared on YouTube on April 22, 2007, while the official video on the performer's channel came out on April 23. For the meme's history it is enough to say that everything happened at the end of April 2007.

For the joke, what matters is the combination of a short, almost absurd image and a very serious manner of performance. It is precisely the gap between content and delivery that later became the basis for captions and parodies.

From a forum to a mass audience

According to the performer, interest began as a joke on the 4chan forum, and then the video reached a wide audience and set off a wave of imitations. In summer 2007 the Canadian channel CTV called the video the hottest viral clip of the season.

In August 2007 the performer appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in a segment devoted to internet talents, which shows how quickly interest moved from the web to television. In 2008 the song received a YouTube Award in the “Music” category.

Parodies and appearances in series

Parodies quickly became a genre of their own. The animated series Robot Chicken released a sketch called “Chocolate Grain,” in which the performer voiced himself. He also appeared in the Weezer music video for “Pork and Beans.” Green Day's drummer Tré Cool and musician John Mayer recorded their own joke versions for television and YouTube.

On April 2, 2008, the South Park episode “Canada on Strike” aired, after which the video's view count rose noticeably. In the series The Office, Michael Scott says he watched the Cookie Monster version of the song about a thousand times. These references show that a line from the song has become part of the shared cultural language.

Why the caption “Chocolate Rain” works

The joke's mechanics lie in the contrast between solemnity and triviality. When something trivial happens in the picture, the phrase about chocolate rain sounds like a grand, almost meteorological event, and an everyday scene becomes a meme.

Example one: “The report was submitted five minutes before the deadline. Chocolate rain outside the window.” The relief is conveyed through an image rather than words about joy, so the reader understands the hero's state without explanation.

Example two: “Found the last candy in my coat. Solemn silence. Chocolate rain.” The caption gives the object a meaning it doesn't have, which is the same device as in the song: a simple image delivered very seriously.

Example three: “Coffee spilled on the keyboard, and nobody was hurt. Chocolate rain.” It's funny that the caption doesn't console but declares the misfortune a natural phenomenon, making the everyday incident gentler than reality.

What's in the photo

The photo shows a man in glasses and a gray jacket smiling and holding a microphone at his shoulder. The background is purple, with thin horizontal stripes. Under the jacket is a burgundy T-shirt with a white insert: part of the lettering “CHOCO…” and a small image of a face are visible on it. There is no caption naming the person in the frame.

For the meme, the song matters more than the person in the picture. Such a frame is best captioned with a short phrase about an unexpectedly solemn trifle: the microphone and wide smile create a sense of performance by themselves, and the lettering on the T-shirt suggests the link to the song.

How to use this reference

The phrase works well at the end of a short everyday story: first a small event, then an unexpectedly lofty frame. The more mundane the trigger, the stronger the effect. If the trigger is already grandiose, the joke disappears, because the gap between scale and delivery vanishes.

Captions are better written in Russian, leaving the song title in English only where a recognizable reference is needed. Then the reader familiar with the original gets the joke at once, and others will understand it through the image of sweet rain.