What makes a cultural gesture annoying when it used to be droll? Sometimes, it is because the wrong people are doing it, such as when parents try to floss (the dance move, not the dental stuff). Sometimes, it has just been around too long and has become hackneyed. And, sometimes, it was deliberately obnoxious from the very beginning, but the ludic potential for irritating people on purpose has been eroded by time, and now they don’t care why you are getting on their nerves, they simply know that you are.
The mic drop is all of these things. It is meant to indicate that you have just been so funny, so show-stopping and irrefutable that the final word has been had. There is no further need of a microphone, for you or anyone else.
Associated with 1980s comedy, it was actually borrowed from rap, where it had a subtly different meaning: I have such a lot of raw human energy, plus such natural dominance over all I survey, that I simply have to break something. This was a natural evolution from smashing your guitar or throwing a TV through a hotel window. It is fun to watch musicians break stuff. No one knows why. These destructive acts are not interchangeable – when Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, who would have been fine setting fire to a drum, say, dropped his mic at the Brit awards in 2014, it was embarrassing from every angle, partly because he offered to pay for it beforehand.
Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock could argue – were they minded to engage – that their own mic drops were making quite a subtle and self-deprecating point about machismo, triumph and humour. The whole joke of the mic drop was that it is inherently absurd for a comedian to appropriate the raw sexual energy of the musician, since humour is self-aware and energy is un-self-aware. It is, as you can infer, quite a male mode of self-expression: female mic drops have occurred, but so rarely that they are filed by the internet under “mic-drop girl”, as in, “cat who can talk”.
By the 90s, it was no more than a phrase, an unoriginal quirk or a bugbear for sound engineers, but, then, along came Barack Obama in 2016. You don’t need the details: his started off as a joke – wouldn’t it be funny if he did it? – and then he really did it, and then it was a meme and, pretty soon, its rich history as a complicated parody, indeed, the fact that it had a history at all, had completely vanished.
Cricketers mimed it – India’s captain Virat Kohli bated Joe Root last week, and, recontextualised by Edgbaston, all it meant was: “I’m better than you.” Is there anything less charming? Geraint Thomas, winning the Tour de France, made a very sweet speech that was mainly about how tired he was. He finished with a mic drop. It is only acceptable, now, when you are almost asleep, which puts it somewhere near laughing for no reason or forgetting your own name.
