People online are throwing slices of cheese at babies, and Karl From Online wants justice.
If you hadn’t heard, a clip of someone throwing a slice of cheese (or really, a slice of processed cheese product) at a child went viral last week. Eventually, more videos of people throwing the ubiquitous dairy squares at infants surfaced, and the thing was declared “a trend.”
Left largely uncredited in this lactose clusterfuck is 24-year-old former Vine star Karl Bergholz, AKA Karl From Online, who has been recording and posting videos of himself throwing Kraft singles at various shit since around 2015.
The Chicago-area native (who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine) said he came up with the idea after he and a friend spent time throwing pickles “against walls and other things” for fun, trying to get them to stick.
“We eventually evolved and threw cheese singlets,” he told me via text, “which [my friend’s] parents had a shit load of because they would feed them to their dog. So it just became a hobby of ours to toss a slice around here and there.”
After high school, Karl began to build some buzz on Vine, eventually amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and millions upon millions of “loops,” the rough equivalent of “views” on Vine. Man, remember when loops were a thing?
Anyway, his recordings of himself messing around with cheese singles in particular garnered a lot of attention, often clearing hundreds of thousands to millions of loops. He was even nominated for a Shorty award, in part for “his habit of tossing American cheese slices at things.“
Karl, who now works as a Christmas tree farmer, among other gigs, says he stopped chucking cheese when Vine was killed off in early 2017. Vine being dead also makes many of his videos hard to view, as Vines often won't play properly when embedded in articles or elsewhere. The Vine embeds in this article, for instance, can be best viewed by navigating to Karl's profile from the top left corner dropdown in each clip.
It’s hard to say for sure if Bergholz directly inspired the *ahem* “viral #cheesing craze,” but he certainly preceded it. Regardless, I still think his videos hold up way better than than any of this new shit, primarily because his clips are not at the expense of children. After all, Karl overwhelmingly threw slices at inanimate objects— mirrors, trains, junk in abandoned lots, etc. There is a Vine of him tossing a cheese single at a cat, and he admits to once throwing one at his buddy George, though for the life of me I couldn’t find video of that on his Vine page.
Though the original Facebook post and Twitter rip that sent the baby clip viral appear to have both been deleted, this #cheesing thing will probably find a way to keep spiraling. So, if you just want the satisfaction of watching geometric yellow-orange goop get stuck to stuff without laughing at an infant, I recommend you check Karl’s clips out. If not, that’s cool too— It’s probably only a matter of time until you’ll be watching the Paul brothers pelt someone’s newborn with lactose products on Ellen.
Man, I miss Vine.
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