The origin
Rickrolling sends someone expecting one destination to Rick Astley's 1987 video for 'Never Gonna Give You Up'.
How it spread
The bait-and-switch spread on imageboards in 2007, building on an earlier joke called duckrolling, then travelled across the whole web.
What it means
The surprise is the format. A convincing setup turns an ordinary link into a shared joke — here, links are labelled honestly.
Follow the source
Short editorial summary written by Random Access Memes from the sources above; the wording is ours, not theirs. Every link was checked for a live response on September 13, 2026.
