It began when someone posted the following message on the Chinese World of Warcraft forum: “Jia Junpeng, your mum is calling you to come home and eat.” Within days, the words were appearing on websites and discussion rooms across China. Within weeks, the phrase appeared on T-shirts, was used as an advertising slogan and became part of a human rights campaign.

News outlets were soon scrambling to discover whether Jia Junpeng was a real person, while marketing men took responsibility for what they claimed was a “viral campaign”. Not only were they missing the point, they had fallen for an internet in-joke.

In much the same way as a sitcom can turn a phrase into a ubiquitous punchline, the internet is rife with throwaway ideas that get proportionally funnier the more people repeat them. For instance, The Lying Down Game resulted in thousands of people posing for pictures lying down in public and posting them online.

Before lying down, there was Sleeveface, the basic concept of which was to photograph yourself with a 12-inch record in front of your face, and Extreme Ironing. Type the words into Google and images of people ironing under water, perched on rocks, even jumping out of aircraft will pop up.

A few years ago, Eighties pop singer Rick Astley found that he himself had become an internet joke with the trend of “Rick-rolling”. Web users would send each other e-mails containing a link that looked useful, but which led to a video for the star’s Never Gonna Give You Up hit single.

The only point of these trends is making other people laugh, although clearly not everyone will find them amusing. Seven staff, including doctors, were suspended from Swindon’s Great Western hospital for allegedly playing The Lying Down Game at work.

Perhaps they should have taken note of the China Daily’s advice after the Jia Junpeng phenomenon: “The context-less sentence can be a reminder that roaming through cyberspace should never detract from what one does in real life.”

Times recommends

• The Boxing Day tsunami: five years on
• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?