Credit: Far Out / YouTube Stills

You can divide the life of the average millennial into two segments. There’s the innocent life you had before seeing 2 Girls, 1 Cup, and the life you have after it.

Technically speaking, I’m still in the first segment. I struggle with gross-out stuff at the best of times, and when this video spread through my school like wildfire when I was about 14, I had no shame whatsoever in refusing to test my nerve against it. I held my hands up and said, “Yeah, nah, this (quite literal) shit is not for me.” Yet despite that, there’s still a bizarre sense of nostalgia to be found in a film that, to this day, I would still rather chew my own toes off than watch a single frame of.

After all, it was one of the first truly shocking viral sensations. A video spread by people who were genuinely shocked and disgusted by its content. Today, things go viral because some marketing asshole in chinos sends a video to some other assholes in suits who call some other assholes in suits at social media companies to make millions of bots amplify said video. There’s vanishingly little about the modern internet that’s organic, and, pun absolutely not intended, 2 Girls, 1 Cup is organic.

Even when it made its way into the mainstream, there was something real about celebrities getting involved with the sensation. Conan O’Brien wrote a sketch parodying the video for Andy Richter called One Guy, Two Bowls, in which Richter calmly eats soup from two bowls in front of him. Amy Schumer also made a sketch where she auditions for a role in the film; however, each of them was late to the party because John Mayer got there first.

So, why did John Mayer make a parody of 2 Girls, 1 Cup?

John Mayer’s original appeal was similar to Jacob Collier’s today. A prodigiously talented musician who was also young, hot and marketable. Appealing to the musos for his sheer ability and to the teeny-boppers for his cheekbones.

However, Mayer had something that Collier didn’t as well, which was a relatable everyman streak and what, at the time, passed for a solid sense of humour.

There’s a good reason he had a cameo in The Chapelle Show; Mayer loved comedy as much as music. He wasn’t anywhere near as good at it, though, so when he actually tried to make a go at being a comedian, 2 Guys, 1 Cup was born. In the video, which Mayer posted to his blog, he and comedian Sherrod Small ate pinkberry frozen yoghurt in a way that parodied the girls in the original clip. A statement so embarrassingly millennial I should probably suffix it with, like, “roflcopter” or something. God, we were the worst.

Yet, there is something to be learned from the whole debacle. It’s still a famous person using the internet as an average citizen would. These days, Mayer would have had to pitch it to his management team, who would almost certainly tell him to stop fannying about and start using that TikTok account the way it was intended, as a non-stop content promotion machine. Are Mayer’s antics cringe? Yes, deeply so, but so is humanity.

Humanity is a forgotten element that the internet used to have in spades, for better and for worse.