I woke up this morning with multiple people writing to ask me if I was going to say anything about the hilarious story about the Boston bro who was arrested for posing as a museum guide. The story was buzzing across my various feeds. And, well, I guess I am going to cover it, though mainly to say the obvious: It’s fake, folks! Fake!

The tale, as it has circulated over the last few days, is that 34-year-old Ethan Caldwell, acting with “aggressively educational confidence,” got away with making up wacky stories about paintings for several days at an unnamed Boston museum, pretending to be a guide. “Several guests later demanded refunds when they discovered none of it was true,” we hear, which caused him to be hauled away by police.

How do I know it’s not true? For one thing, despite being styled as a local news story, nothing like a halfway credible news source covered it.

Also, the many, many memes circulating feature different people identified as the always suspiciously comely Caldwell. He’s quite the master of disguise!

Threads screenshot of another version of the fake story.

Ten seconds of research shows that the tale originates with an account called The Dude Humor Report, which describes itself thusly: “satire & parody stories that are exaggerated, developing fictional created for entertainment purposes only.” It trades in a particularly irritating genre of humor involving items that sound like real “news-of-the-weird” content, but that are not real.

The account posts dozens of memes a day with cutting-edge satire such as “Man Charged After Admitting He Downloaded DoorDash Specifically to Steal His First Order and Eat It Because He Was Broke.”

The fake-tours story was a breakout hit for this heretofore obscure meme account. It has run up 150,000 likes with 9,500 comments on Instagram, while most of its posts average less than a hundred likes and a few dozen comments.

The WildKares.life version of the story.

You know how this works. The fake news was rapidly picked up, reprocessed, and reshared as real, inspiring reactions in the comments ranging from hilarity to outrage to incredulity. There was lots of commentary of the “Not all heroes have capes” variety, and the “Handsome and smart man. Museum should give him a job” variety, and “I’m curious as to the actual charges” variety, and the “He gets arrested and yet Trump walks free” variety.

Courtney Lopez (wife of Mario) seems to have been a super-spreader. It was also amplified by accounts that host links to outrageous real news, such as the truly wretched CursedNews4You, which shared the yuks about “Ethan Caldwell” alongside a post about a woman in Brazil who died from a fall off a bridge when her bungee cord wasn’t secured, a real tragedy.

And… there’s not much more to note. The original Dude Humor meme had the fabulated prankster justifying himself by saying his tours were “far more entertaining than the real ones.” Which is a nice little self-reflective touch about what fuels viral outbreaks like this. The media literacy crisis does not exempt art.

But why not look for a silver lining in the cloud of slop? The Dude Humor Report has accidentally workshopped a pretty good idea. “I love this,” says someone in Lopez’s comments. “Museums should do this as a comedy night I’m sure people would attend.” That, I think, is true.