More than that, it inspired an entire cottage industry of web content. (Diesel would later become a meme itself, but that’s another story.)
The concept proved so popular that it later inspired a second Comedy Goldmine post in 2006, plus an entire “safe for work porn” commercial for Diesel jeans, circa 2008. In the beginning, there was a 2002 “Comedy Goldmine” post on humor site Something Awful called, “ Make Porn Work-Safe.” Comedy Goldmine was a regular feature collecting Photoshopped images from the Something Awful forums, always centered around a single theme: in this case, replacing the nudity in porn stills with regular, mundane objects. Here’s how “SFW porn memes” went from a good joke on the Something Awful forums in the early 2000s to, 15 years later, a staple of the meme ecosystem. Unlike uncensored porn, sharing these comedy images doesn’t violate the no-nudity clauses of some of the big networks. Ironically, the advent of modern social media has made jokes based on “sanitized” porn even more popular. Back when there was no Facebook, no Twitter, and no Reddit, people were finding (barely) safe-for-work (SFW) ways to share porn jokes. Porn and memes have been a perfect match since before an “internet meme” was even a thing.