Tweet Highlights from the Super Bowl Black Out

Tweets and Facebook posts like this one hit cyberspace as soon as lights went out in the Dome.

For those who aren’t invested in one of the teams in the Super Bowl, the commercials and halftime show usually are the redeeming factors.

While Beyoncé turned it out and Bud Light stepped it up, this year’s dark horse entertainment was the blackout and subsequent reaction.

This is the stuff Twitter dreams are made of. It exploded with jokes of all kinds, but these were the biggest and brightest.

1. Ray Lewis saw who killed the lights. Probably the easiest joke of the blackout, but still a good one. Variations include the more straightforward, “Ray Lewis killed the lights,” but what evidence do you have? He’ll cooperate. Just give him a deal.
2. It’s okay, Super Bowl. I blacked out in New Orleans, too. Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, bachelor parties, Bourbon Street, any night of the week, really, black outs occur across the city, but more through the form of drinking too much. The Dome just had a few too many on Super Bowl Sunday Funday.
3. We just talked to Entergy. They said they’ll have someone out in 2 to 3 weeks. In recent memory, this applies to Hurricane Isaac, but really any time the power has been out in New Orleans ever. They said that the outage was a problem on the Dome’s side, but I doubt that will stop anyone from giving them flak.
4. Beyonce blew out the lights with her performance/hair dryer/general fabulousness. Imma let you finish, Ravens and Niners, but Beyonce had the best Super Bowl performance of all time. Variations include, “Beyonce won the Super Bowl so everyone decided to go home,” and “Bring Beyonce back. She can turn on anything.”
5. Hopefully this turns out better than the last time the Dome lost power. Katrina jokes. It would be one thing if they were funny, but the general crop seems to be pretty weak. (Although one did strike a macabre funnybone: “This time it was the rich who were trapped in the Superdome.”)
6. This is not a terrorist incident. This was not a joke. It was tweeted by @NolaReady. The joke is that, at least according to Twitter and Facebook, no one thought that this was a terrorist incident. The power went out and the local reaction was, “Of course this would happen. Only in New Orleans.”
7. WHERE’S BANE? If you’ve seen “Dark Knight Rises,” then you’ll remember the scene in which Bane annihilates a stadium and declares anarchy in Gotham. Sure, for some cities it may have been an atmosphere ripe for riots, but everyone in the Dome was either a player, a kid, or too drunk to rally.
8. This blackout is New Orleans’s revenge to Goodell. Conspiracy theorists are all over the internet, noting that the Dome has never experienced a black out during a game until now. If the Saints don’t win, no one wins. Who dat!

Anna Shults is associate editor of NolaVie.