Lady and gentleman, you’ve endured one hell of a week. Five days of horrible fardel, squeezing your shoulders, crushing your body into the ground with similar routines: you get up and eat, then sleep, and work. Then you repeat it for 52 weeks in a year. Who was it who did this to you? Who was the guy who first suggested “Hmm, what if we built our whole society around people doing the same thing over and over again five days in a row”? Perhaps father of that person who believed that you should be working seven days in the same row. Didn’t you get jetpacks? Where are flying automobiles? (Helicopters don’t count.) Robot butlers? (Roomba doesn’t count.) What’s the matter? Do you think it is appropriate to be on the streets and take up arms?
Ladies and gentlemen, the conditions are unacceptable and need to improve.
Gentlemen and ladies, there’s some good news to report on this front.
Lady and gentleman, there’s an incredible healing force that is loving you and desires better things for you. Even during your most difficult times (Mondays or, perhaps, Wednesdays, the home of the infamous expression “hump day”), the force of healing is right just in front of you, waiting to be embraced waiting to take you into its loving arms. This force is among the inevitable forces, constantly moving closer, always nearer. All you need to do is to wait to see it … just wait to see it …
Gentlemen and ladies, this is the weekend is upon us.
There’s a hilarious meme that which a lot of people are retweeting on a regular basis every weekday afternoon. It’s a short clip taken from “Saturday Night Live” in the actors Daniel Craig introduces that show’s musical guest: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd.” The clip ends shortly before we watch that the Weeknd sing his fifth number. #1 track, “Blinding Lights ,” >> so, without any context the video is just a clip of the man who is James Bond telling us what we already know: the weekend is upon us, and that’s a great thing.
There’s usually nothing else on these routine intros that are an integral part in all “SNL” show, except the sheer force of repeating, “SNL” has made this tiny transitional tack one of the most well-known cultural elements in the American weekend.
However, there’s something more bizarre about Craig’s introduction to the Weeknd. After he’s said “ladies and gentlemen,” Craig pauses, then throws his arms up in a half-smile in surrender and speaks in a calm elegant baritone “the Weeknd.”
Every actor has a choice about how they can interact with their audience beyond what they’re given. And for any reason Craig was one of the most famous performers took a simple boring intro and transformed it with the alchemy of the body and voice to signal that a significant burden was lifted off us the long-running wait for the Weeknd was done.
The Weeknd. The weekend. The weekend takes the strain off.
“Every week the replies are very similar to the last week,” says Miles Riehle, 18, an incoming high college senior in Orange County, Calif. He usually enjoys urbanism on Twitter however, he created the account Twitter, @CraigWeekend, which tweets the video at random intervals every Friday afternoon, typically before five p.m. Pacific so the East Coast can get in on the fun. (That’s correct: They’re actually Dan Craig Memes for teens who are transit-oriented..) The account of Riehle’s jokes has more than 255,000 fans. “A number of people have plenty of opinions about the manner in which Daniel Craig says it, or many people have something to say about how he moves his arms. One of the responses I get most often is, “My weekend can’t begin until I read this tweet in.'”
It’s true. Recent responses:
March 9th “It’s not the weekend until this tweet arrives”
February 2: “the consistency of this actually truly makes my week better, knowing that this will always post just gives me security for some reason”
The 26th of March: “It’s not the weekend until this tweet arrives, don’t you know?”
“It’s a silly four-second video, I don’t think it’s anything bigger than that,” says Riehle who isn’t an Craig or Weeknd superfan, nor is he a Craig or Weeknd hater. He is a fan of both and, as a part of Gen Z He accepts posting just for the sake of posting, even if it’s an everyday part of life. “Am I going to do this for the remainder of my days? I’m not sure.”
There’s one final thing to note about this snarky video and it’s the scene at the end of the video when a Live “SNL” studio crowd erupts in cheers of joy following Craig’s opening. The show premiered on the 7th of March in 2020, after which the COVID-19 pandemic shut downs placed the show on hiatus and forced cast members of “SNL” cast to their home. This is an artifact of another time, before this one. As time passed, the program came back into the studio, with security measures, but the majority of America is waiting for to join the crowd, and to listen to the introductions over and over again, and then roar when we hear the emcee.
It’ll repeat itself. In the coming weekend, along the way.
