Poor Shannon Noll. It’s bad enough he’ll go down in history as the guy who missed out on winning the first season of Australian Idol, but now he can’t even play a gig at a local pub without getting mercilessly trolled.
It’s not easy being one of Australia’s favourite punchlines. If the Daily Mail isn’t on your back, taking snaps of you as you just try to enjoy a smoothie in your favourite black tank top, you’re getting your Facebook events pages flooded with memes.
It all started last year, when Nollsy was scheduled to play Goulburn’s Astor Hotel in October. Though the venue could only reasonably hold a few hundred patrons, thousands expressed interest and made their Nollsy fever known.
In the lead-up to the performance, imaginative internet users transformed the Astor Hotel gig’s Facebook event page into a cache of increasingly bizarre and hilarious Noll-based memes, including several appearances of the beloved ‘Shannanol’ trope.
This all went down back in August and resulted in page admins deleting swarms of posts. Five months later, it’s all happening again. Nollsy is set to play a gig at Sydney’s Bridge Hotel this March and what’s happening on the event page is definitely not what Nollsy is talking about:
At the time of writing 3,900 Nollsy addicts have indicated they will be attending the gig and 5,700 have expressed interest in seeing the man behind the 33rd biggest selling album in Australia do his thing on the live stage.
While the memes are admittedly hilarious and in some cases very creative, you have to shed just a little tear for the Condoblin native, who can’t so much as announce a gig without having the internet swarm over it like locusts.
The latest attempt at trolling the greatest Australian Idol winner we never had? Someone has launched a Change.org petition to see the ‘What About Me?’ hit-maker play the next instalment of Groovin The Moo.
See more of the fallout below.
