Everybody knows that one of the best parts of being a sports fan is debating and dissecting the most (and least) important questions in the sporting world with your friends. So, we’re bringing that to the pages of LGHL with our favorite head-to-head column: You’re Nuts.

In You’re Nuts, two LGHL staff members will take differing sides of one question and argue their opinions passionately. Then, in the end, it’s up to you to determine who’s right and who’s nuts.

Today’s Question: What was your favorite Aaron Rodgers joke of the weekend?

For Context: Immediately following the Green Bay Packers’ 13-10 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Saturday, the entirety of Twitter started firing off all of their best jokes aimed at presumptive NFL MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Regardless of what you think of Rodgers’ stance on... well, anything, the jokes were very funny and there were a lot of them.

Jami’s Take:

As a Bears fan who hates the Packers almost as much as I hate Michigan, nothing brought me more joy this weekend than watching Green Bay get booted from the playoffs and then consuming every Aaron Rodgers joke that followed on the internet.

But of all the brilliant ones I saw, by far my favorite was this tweet:

If you missed the drama back in November, Rodgers missed the Packers’ game against Kansas City - which the Packers lost 13-7 - due to Covid-19. He previously told reporters he was “immunized,” but he had not, and has not, been vaccinated.

Listen, I’m not here to debate vaccines (get vaccinated tho...), but if you make a choice, own it. Rodgers’ decision to lie about it sent my eyes so far back into my head I could see my brain.

The beauty of the pile-on with Rodgers is that he actually tried to rationalize their loss by saying people were rooting against the Packers because of his vaccine status instead of comprehending with his pea brain that people hate the Packers simply for being the Packers.

Maybe I should give him a few weeks to do his own research on all the reasons no one likes Green Bay.

In these divisive times we live in, the Internet hasn’t been so united over one good meme takedown in ages. It was delightful to log in and know everyone was on the same page — celebrating the Packers’ loss as God intended.

It would take apocalyptic circumstances for me to root for the Packers on a good day. But this year especially, I have no patience for Rodgers and his tomfoolery. As the playoffs forge ahead, it brings me a tremendous amount of inner peace to know Green Bay will have the same viewing experience as me — watching from their couches.

Matt’s Take:

Look, Jami’s joke is a masterpiece, no doubt, but there are so many others that deserve consideration as well, so I am going to run through a number of them as I chart the lifespan of this moment that seemingly everyone on the internet was involved in. I mean, if you hopped over to Twitter on Saturday, it did pretty much look like this:

What was fascinating to watch about this pop-up pile-on, from a sociological and anthropological point of view, was the different waves in which these jokes flowed across social media. The initial onslaught took a fairly direct route at some of Rodgers’ most ridiculous statements.

These jokes centered around Rodgers’ incessant need to rationalize his lying about being vaccinated earlier in the season. While the QB now wants to say that people only wanted to see him lose for his anti-vax position, I maintain that most of the people who were piling on never would have even known about his anti-science opinions had he not:

a) lied about it, and
b) gone on multiple radio and television shows to spew his completely inaccurate, uninformed, and honestly idiotic opinions about the pandemic and vaccines.

So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of the jokes hit him pretty hard from this angle.

But in the second phase of this naturally occurring phenomenon, tweeters had to get a bit more creative with their delivery, since the low-hanging, anti-vax fruit had already been picked clean from those social media trees.

So, there was an outcropping of jokes that punnily created new nicknames for Rodgers by combining the views that he has been very vocal about and his job as an NFL quarterback. For example, “Aaron Fraudgers” was trending for a while on Saturday evening just as these were popping up as well.

But, my favorite jokes came in the post-neohumorist era of this movement in which the Twitter artists took their jokes a step further, both in creativity and execution. As previously outlined, the tweets first evolved from the obvious to the silly — which was fun, but simple and expected — but, things really got interesting following the final progression as the jokes transcended to the next level of humor by extrapolating the basic social and political commentary found in Phase 1 to a slightly more askew perspective.

These jokes tended to have more of a political bend to them, even though they were not specifically about the unhinged opinions that Rodgers has become famous for spouting. Instead, they took other well-worn conservative talking points and tied those in with the quarterback’s current predicament.

I think most people of varying world views and political opinions can agree that Twitter — by and large — is a miserable cesspool of diseased and disillusioned individuals. However, we stay on the godforsaken hellsite for — in the words of the patron saint of all that is good and holy, Kelly Clarkson — moments like this. The country’s collective energies focus on one unimportant, but wildly entertaining thing to show us that we can build coalitions across disparate demographics and ideologies. These are the kumbaya moments of the social media era.

Ok, so now that I have exhausted all of my histrionics, my friends, here is my favorite joke of Saturday’s #Aarongeddon: