The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day: Ironic joke, or something more?
In many ways, rituals form the foundation of communities. Some communities go to church every Sunday, while others run away from bulls together.
Ritual is embedded in everything from sports to culture to religion to music, and these things all bond us together. But after millennia of evolution, we now have something better than all those dumb things. We have the unstoppable phenomenon that is The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day Facebook page. Yes. This is where society is headed, and it’s not as bad as you might think.
Clocking in at 16,240 followers at last count, at first glance The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day (TSPODCED) seems to be the world’s most involved and pointless joke. As the name implies, its administrator shares the same picture each day of Full(er) House star and infamous Alanis Morissette life-ruiner Dave Coulier, who is quite possibly the most non-threatening person ever — except for that Alanis Morissette business, which actually seems quite intense. Like I’m pretty sure that’s how I learned the “f word.”
This stuff is not new: the concept has been around since 2011, in the form of a tumblr that shared — wait for it! — the same picture of Dave Coulier every day, and there are actual social scientists studying this phenomenon as a way to figure out how fake news spreads. (It’s a real shame they didn’t figure that shit out before the 2016 election, TBH.)
There are many other similar pages on Facebook for personalities ranging from Kim Jong-Un to Nicolas Cage. (Ok, that’s actually a pretty specific personality type.) But the consensus seems to be that one beautiful picture of Dave Coulier started the whole thing, and the Facebook page is certainly one of the most liked of its kind…but why are people doing this?
When asked why he started The Same Photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger Facebook page, its administrator would only mysteriously intone that it was “started for the same reason that the others were…the Universe put out it’s (sic) call for them, and i answered.”
TSPODCED’s owner is a little less enigmatic in his rationale. After seeing the original tumblr blog, the admin wanted “to bring the enjoyment to people on Facebook,” and “to keep the torch going,” as it were.
An active member of the TSPODCED community says he leaves the same comment every day as a way to help out the administrator, who had publicly admitted to be going through a difficult time a while ago. This member sees himself as a part of a handful of regular contributors, proclaiming that “it’s a small thing I do for what I think is life stuff.”
The administrator echoes this sentiment: when I asked him what he was getting out of all of this, he admitted that he was doing it for the greater good. “A lot of people look forward to these posts each day, so I do it for them,” he explained.
And indeed — every picture gets upwards of 140 likes, and the Dave Coulier page is somehow sixteen times more liked than a similar page featuring Full House dreamboat John Stamos. Get it, Dave. But actually, get it, John because OH MY GOD.
The community section of TSPODCED reads like a scrapbook of the page — people have left hand drawings of Dave, a disturbing face morph of the picture the page is dedicated to, and dozens of plaintive laments at various periods when the administrator apparently stopped posting the infamous picture every day.
I can’t say I expected to find a supportive community forming around a Facebook page dedicated to sharing the same photo of a supporting member of my favourite nineties family-oriented sitcom, but that’s exactly what happened.
While I was thinking that everyone was just having a laugh, it seems there’s more to it: everyone is doing their part to keep the community together.
We can only speculate as to what Dave himself thinks of his role in this latest evolution of our species. When he was asked during his reddit AMA if he had seen the page, Coulier did not respond. Same when I messaged him on Facebook. How rude!
“What’s the fucking point,” asked a friend when I told her what I was writing about. “Maybe if I see it, I’ll understand,” she softened her tone after learning of my emotional investment in the page, echoing my own journey from derision to respect for the project and the people behind it.
But the truth is I still don’t quite understand either. But maybe that’s the point. Human kind has been building communities out of objectively outlandish and silly things since our days of hanging out in caves while playing with fidget spinners, or whatever we did to pass the time. TSPODCED is simply the logical conclusion — the apex, really — of our evolutionary trajectory. And in our fractured and garbage fire world as it is today, I’d argue that we need TSPODCED now more than ever. Shine on, you ironic Dave Coulier fans.
