2007 / Video / Creator-made puppet parody and earworm
Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise
A mysterious tick turned into “Snape, Snape, Severus Snape” and lodged itself in a generation’s brain.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
Snape hears a ticking noise and begins chanting his own name. Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, and Harry pile into the rhythm until the little puppet stage has become a completely unreasonable singalong.
Where it came from
Neil Cicierega posted this Potter Puppet Pals short to YouTube on March 23, 2007. Its handmade puppets, escalating vocal canon, and abrupt punchline turned a fandom parody into an early YouTube fixture.
Why it mattered
It is early-web comedy at its most efficient: homemade props, a joke that gets funnier through repetition, and an audio hook people could repeat long after closing the browser.
How it spread
The short traveled as a quotable, replayable YouTube link during the platform’s formative viral-video years. The “Snape, Snape, Severus Snape” refrain escaped the clip and became shared fandom shorthand.
Keep going
The same corner of the internet
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I like trains. The internet liked that this was apparently a complete sentence.