The early web
Mr. T Ate My Balls
1996
Mr. T Ate My Balls was a joke web page Nehal Patel, a University of Illinois student, made in 1996, with roughly edited photos of the actor Mr. T and comic speech bubbles. It was copied so often, for so many other stars, that Ate My Balls became one of the first joke formats of the web.
- Year
- 1996
- Made by
- Nehal Patel, a student at the University of Illinois
- Where it started
- A student’s page on a university web server
- What it was
- A joke web page, copied for other celebrities
- Also called
- Ate My Balls
The story
The line began as a dorm prank: in spring 1996 someone broke the glass of an exit sign on Patel’s floor and wrote it on the sign, and a web page of Mr. T pictures followed. It was meant as a private joke.
It did not stay private. By August 1997 Yahoo’s directory listed more than 230 Ate My Balls pages, about everyone from Elmo to Bill Gates, and at least half a dozen other lists existed. Salon’s writer thought the joke worked by irony: the less a subject had to do with it, the likelier it was to get a page.
By 2000 the Miami Herald counted more than 800,000 visits to Patel’s original page, and the humour columnist Dave Barry wrote about the craze in his book Dave Barry in Cyberspace.
Why it matters
It is one of the first internet joke formats that strangers copied and changed for their own subjects, the way most memes have worked since. In 2009 a US court case about a parody website even pointed to it as an example of protected parody.
Where it is now
The craze faded after 2000, and most of its pages vanished when free hosts like GeoCities closed, though copies survive in web archives.
Sources
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.