Everybody is tweeting about “cliff wife”. What is “cliff wife”, and why?

The story of cliff wife is simple, and a perfect illustration of how jokes evolve on Twitter – and how YouTuber culture is slowly rotting our brains.

A man was walking with his wife, when she fell down a small hill; it was quite a tumble and she was shocked, but pretty much uninjured. The man – YouTuber Shaun McBride – decided to film the whole thing, before uploading it as some kind of inspirational brush-with-death morality tale.

“I watched my wife fall off a cliff ... you’re [sic] whole world can change in a matter of seconds,” he wrote.

For many, it is breathtakingly funny: from the unnecessary drama, to the truly small cliff, to the terrible editing, which clearly reveals how much of his own wife’s words McBride cut out.

But why is it a meme? What makes it funny?

Stories like Cliff Wife are so common they have spawned their own online taxonomy: that of the “Wife Guy”.

For the Outline, Tom Whyman explains: “A Wife Guy is defined by the fact that they have done something which involves a wife, whether their own or someone else’s — call this a Wife Event. A Wife Event can take many forms, but it necessarily involves the internet in some way (a long-distance online relationship; a fake social media account; a prominent Instagram presence) and, when discovered, will be widely discussed online. The tone of this discussion will typically be mocking.”

Whyman posits that the ridiculousness of a wife guy comes down to “a particular juxtaposition of the domestic with online”. And when you look closely at wife guys over time, his theory holds water.

What other wife guys are there?

The most prominent example has to be Curvy Wife Guy: an aspiring blogger who wrote an extremely cringey Instagram post about loving his “curvy” (ie perfectly normal) wife, despite “being often teased” as a teenager for liking “girls on the thicker side”. As Intelligencer’s Madison Malone Kircher wrote, this was a man who wanted praise “for finding his own wife attractive”.

There is also Elf Wife Guy, a now-disgraced pro-gamer who cheated on and blocked his wife, a professional elf cosplayer; and Fake Wife Guy, aka Twitter user @ElleOhHell, who posed online as a female comedian for years but eventually admitted he was a man using photos of his own wife, who was divorcing him.

Then of course there’s the ur-Wife Guy: the “Don’t Email My Wife” guy, who was so incensed by an undisclosed online Wife Event that he spray-painted a message on another person’s house.

The proliferation of wife guys meant that by the time Cliff Wife hit, there was a rich canon to draw from and merge with other memes. Many of the resulting tweets are accessible only to the subsect of people who are up-to-date on the latest viral news and/or care about the strange vernacular that proliferates on the subculture that is weird Twitter. (In fact one of weird Twitter’s heroes, @Dril, has a section in his 2018 book of Tweets that is titled simply “wife”.)

Patricia Lockwood has written an extremely meta essay about what it feels like to be wrapped up in this strange world; a world of ephemeral jokes, images and notions that only seem to work online. A set-up like “it me”. The phrase “a spicy meat-a-ball”. The inherently hilarious concept of Matt McGorry. She describes these as jokes “that only half a per cent of people on earth would understand, and that no one would be able to decipher in ten years’ time.” Wife guy feels a lot like that.

So what makes a guy a wife guy?

Simply having a wife is not enough to become a wife guy. In fact some wife guys don’t even have wives; they merely covet them. The wife guy must share his tale, preferably on the internet. He must think it somehow reflects well on him, when actually it doesn’t.

The wife guy must distill his own partner down to some bizarre, frequently stupid or reductive attribute (ie: cliff fall) in a way that says more about him, his own vanity or insecurity, than anything else.

In any wife guy story, it is somehow the guy who becomes the real focus, not his wife. That self-importance makes him fair game for satire. He thinks he is a hero, but something truly unpleasant shines through. That is when the mockery flows. In seeking to define her, the wife guy defines himself.

There’s something so buffoonish and hapless about wife guy. He reminds me of the last time I got swept up in a new online archetype: that of the Large Adult Son.

You’re not the first person to make that connection. Twitter user @SpindlyPete has put together a wonderful thread taking this whole thing much too seriously, but in a good way. In it, she posits that Wife Guy and Large Adult Son are in fact one and the same, with the wives merely “blank slates onto which their husbands weirdness is projected”.

So it’s all basically a big, rolling in-joke?

Yes. As Twitter user @3liza points out, the comic archetypes of the wife and wife guy are eternal, and always orbit each other, from the Commedia dell’arte to Married with Children. The league of modern wife guys are merely the latest gloss on the same joke, with more layers of irony.

And the ceaseless ability of men to be publicly ridiculous ensures it’s not going anywhere soon.

• Naaman Zhou answered Steph Harmon’s questions