UniLad just overtook The LadBible on Facebook likes

The defining conflict of these times has nothing to do with migration or climate change or  Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s hydrogen bomb. It is the ongoing battle between UniLad and The LadBible to see who can get more Facebook likes. Like any war it is ferocious and stupid, brutal and absurd, an arena where we can see what humanity is capable of at its very worst. I suppose when they look back and try to make sense of it, they’ll call it The Lad War, The Hundred Beers War, World War Lad, The Falk-Lads War.

The shockwaves from this desperate struggle are impossible to avoid. Our timelines and newsfeeds are the casualties here, clogged with clickbait headlines, shit Emile Heskey memes and videos with names like “Lad Eats Cactus For His Birthday.” This month the war took another turn. UniLad is now 15,000 likes ahead of The LadBible on Facebook. Wherever they make UniLad they’ll have celebrated, there’ll have been pints.

I wonder if it was as loose as The LadBible’s first birthday party, held a couple of years back in Spearmint Rhino, attended by pervy blokes in blazers (so a friend tells me),  and advertised here in the most politically correct way imaginable:

The UK what tour?

Why do UniLad and The LadBible have 22 million likes on Facebook between them? Why are the stories they tell unavoidable online? Why do we make a hero out of a lad who eats a cactus and share it thousands of times on Facebook? Do these stories become our favourite stories because they fulfill some deep, dumb need to find any distraction from our average office days? Does World War Lad tell us something interesting about ourselves?

Or have people always enjoyed watching other people eat cacti?