JCB Ki Khudai: there goes the afternoon.

It is easy to get stuck watching a JCB. You might stop for a moment because the bucket is about to scoop up some earth. Then you want to see where it drops the load. By the time the arm swings back, another scoop seems worth waiting for.

Meanwhile, you can end up standing there with a bag of groceries, taking an unexpected interest in soil removal.

That is the sort of small, familiar distraction JCB Ki Khudai made a joke of in May 2019. Online, the imaginary audience had an enthusiasm for digging that made every other commitment look optional.

Apparently, this needed a crowd scene

The Quint’s roundup from 29 May 2019 (opens in a new tab) gives a good sense of how the joke grew. One post compared a film crowd with the audience for JCB digging. Another imagined the response to news that a JCB was at work in a friend’s colony. A Lagaan reference got a turn too.

There was plenty to recognise without knowing the films. Imagine being told that some digging was happening down the road and reacting as though you might miss something if you didn’t hurry. How much more exciting could the next hole possibly be? Still, you would want to have a look.

The jokes also picked up on the audiences for digging videos on YouTube. The Quint described people noticing those videos’ view counts and making memes about them. You could leave the construction site, go home, and carry on watching construction on a smaller screen.

Calling the viewers jobless was an easy gag in the posts. A few minutes spent watching a machine do something satisfying hardly gives away a person’s employment history.

About that first post

If you remember the meme but have no idea how it started, the surviving accounts won’t settle it for you. Know Your Meme leaves the original cause unresolved (opens in a new tab). It records the popular digging videos as one explanation, alongside Sunny Leone’s photograph of herself on an excavator, posted on 25 May 2019.

That photograph is a dated part of the story. Calling it the definitive starting point would be tidier than the evidence allows. The Quint foregrounded the YouTube explanation; Know Your Meme kept more than one account. By the time people were trying to work out why their feeds contained so much excavation, there were already plenty of jokes to choose from.

Fortunately, enjoying them required almost no background reading. The three words in the hashtag told you what was on offer. If you had ever lingered beside roadwork, you could supply the rest yourself.

JCB noticed, of course

On 27 May, JCB’s own account thanked its Indian customers and fans for their enthusiasm, in a post preserved by Know Your Meme. A company that sold construction equipment was being handed attention for people enjoying the sight of construction equipment. There wasn’t much reason to complain.

The company could enjoy the attention without having to invent a campaign to get it. The pleasure of watching the equipment was already familiar enough to make the jokes work.

What remains is a remarkably easy meme to remember. You don’t have to recover a dance step or explain a complicated running joke. Come across a JCB digging beside the road and you have the whole thing in front of you again. You might as well watch for a minute.