Rickroll Hidden In Load Handler — Meme Explained

Level 1: Note In The Code

It is like opening a serious-looking instruction manual and finding a sticky note that tricks you into watching a silly video. The machine instructions are boring, but the hidden note is the prank.

Level 2: Load Event Bait

JavaScript is the programming language commonly used to make web pages interactive. An event listener tells the browser, "when this event happens, run this function." In the screenshot, the code listens for the "load" event and then calls load.

The funny part is that the function does not really do anything. It contains comments, including one asking who made this program? and another comment with a hidden link. Comments are ignored by the program, so they do not affect how the page runs. They are there for humans reading the code.

A rickroll is an internet prank where someone is tricked into opening a specific music video instead of what they expected. So this is developer humor mixed with meme culture: the code looks like a technical clue, but the actual destination is a familiar joke.

Level 3: Comment-Driven Payload

The visible JavaScript is almost aggressively ordinary:

function load() {
    // who made this program?
}

window.addEventListener("load", load, false);

The trick is that the real joke is in the omitted second comment line: it contains a link whose video ID is the classic rickroll destination. The post caption asks, "Guess where this links leads to," and the answer is not a production incident, a dependency graph, or a browser bug. It is internet culture hiding in a code comment, because apparently even source files need ambush comedy.

That contrast is the whole meme. window.addEventListener("load", load, false) registers a function to run when the browser window finishes loading. It is normal frontend event-handling code. The load function itself does nothing useful except contain comments. In a serious code review, this would be dead air: a function with no behavior and a comment that does not explain the system. In meme logic, though, the absence of behavior is misdirection. The payload is social, not executable.

Experienced developers have seen this exact species of artifact in real repositories: TODOs that outlived the original author, jokes in comments, mysterious links, passive-aggressive notes, and little fragments of team culture preserved between otherwise boring lines. Comments are supposed to clarify intent, but they also become the office bulletin board of a codebase. Sometimes that means architectural context. Sometimes it means the maintainers hid a pop-culture trap behind a harmless question like who made this program?

The joke also works because developers are trained to inspect suspicious code. A link inside a comment is not executed by JavaScript, but it still invites curiosity. The meme weaponizes that curiosity. The browser event listener is the decoy; the comment is where the developer gets pranked.