So Cute!

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The Philadelphia Eagles posted a TikTok of football player after football player being handed a small package wrapped in colorful foil. You can open it. A caption says that it's the first day of training camp, and that the packages contain plush toys called labuboos. Most of the Eagles players look bewildered as they consider these dolls. They're small enough to fit in the palms of the players' huge football-playing hands. They're furry.

They look kind of like rabbits. They have big, pointy ears. But they also have disproportionately large heads. huge eyes, little button noses, and a toothy smile represented by nine white triangles that look awfully sharp. Which might be why offensive guard Landon Dickerson refuses to accept the one he is handed. He walks away from the camera empty-handed, making the sign of the cross. No, that's evil.

These strange dolls were viral long before a savvy social media manager put them into the hands of NFL players. What's Fuzzy got nine teeth and has people going absolutely crazy. If you want to get in on the trend, be prepared though to pay up because prices have skyrocketed. The toys are based on the work of Kha Sing Lung.

an artist from Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Kassing was inspired by Nordic folklore about trolls and wrote and illustrated a picture book series called The Monsters. One of his creations was named Le Bubu. In 2019, the Chinese manufacturer Pop Mart commissioned toys based on the book series, and the Labubu doll was born. Now, every time Pop Mart drops a new Labubu, they sell out immediately. Part of the appeal is the blind box. You can't know what labubu you've purchased until you unbox it.

It's like the teeny beanies in the McDonald's Happy Meals. First I got Pinky. Then I got Pinky. I got Pinky and Patty in the same week. Or like Pokemon. right like you can buy a deck and not know what's in it and you can have like a golden ticket in there gotta open it up unbox the boo-boos with me let's do a love boo-boo unboxing i really want the loved one

Or The Secret. I have everything else besides those two. These mystery unboxings make for great social media content. Or maybe not great, but, you know, people are into it. all of which contributes to the ubiquity of these dolls on the internet. I have labubu fever. And there's no cure! Celebrities carry keychain labubus on designer bags. There's even a meme circulating of a labubu doll placed on the ground next to Karl Marx's tooth.

among flowers and other more typical graveside offerings. We can't verify that this picture was real, but it says something about this day and age. You ain't got to own the means of La Boo Boo production. The insane popularity of these dolls has led to shopping aisle showdowns. At one point, Pop Mart had to actually pull La Boo Boo's from their physical stores in the UK because...

Yeah, that was me. Sorry, guys. And of course, the popularity has also led to knockoffs known as lafufus. The Eagles, by the way. Eagles, they actually had lefufus, according to the full caption of that TikTok video. It's like they don't have enough Super Bowl rings to get LaBuboos. You know, the NFL. Times is hard. Budgets is tight. There are many videos building on the joke that there's something sinister about these little dolls. Except for maybe, to some people, it's not a joke.

Yes, I am afraid we are quite serious. This is just another fad that people are buying into not understanding the spiritual ramifications. People are saying that these things are cute that they have to collect them and get as many as they can. Bro, this is demonic. But at the heart of it. People are not buying these things because, as the theory goes, they're under the influence of an ancient demon called Pazuzu.

Bazuzu is, by the way, a dark figure from the Mesopotamian mythology. His interest in modern internet trends could not be journalistically confirmed. But no, while some people find these big-eyed, sharp-toothed, wide-smiled, rotund creatures scary, their biggest fans feel quite the opposite. She's so cute and fat. Oh my gosh, she's actually really cute. She is the cutest thing ever. Look at her. She is so cute. Cute toys went viral before we had TikTok or Instagram.

Back to my teeny beanies, case in point. But social media has accelerated how quickly these toy trends spread. Before Libuboos, TikTok was flooded with videos of squishmallows and jelly cats. And it's not just toys. Some of the earliest globally viral videos were cat videos. You know, have you ever seen those cats getting freaked out by cucumber videos, Amory? You bet I have. Creepy, creepy cucumbers. That's me. That's me if you were a cat.

There are whole internet communities built around cuteness, like furries and big-eyed characters from manga and anime. So why does the internet take cuteness and run with it? To answer that question, we talked to maybe the world's preeminent cuteness expert, the pioneer of a whole academic field called cuteness studies. Joshua Paul Dale. Cuteness unlocks all of these social behaviors in our brain and makes us want to get closer to things and connect with things and communicate with them.

I'm Anne-Marie Sievertson. I'm Ben Bragg Johnson. And this is Endless La Boo Boo. Coming to you from W La Boo Boo. You are in Boston. In today's episode, as Anne-Marie is demonstrating, we're getting cute. Or we're just losing it. Don't get cute with me. Joshua Paul Dale is a professor at Che University in Tokyo, as well as the author of Irresistible, How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.

For many years, researchers thought about cuteness specifically in terms of nurturing. You know, if we think something's cute, we want to take care of it. But Joshua makes a case in his book that cuteness is about more than taking care of small things. He argues that cute things also bring out our desire to be social and to play. Do you think La Boo Boo dolls are cute? Personally, I see why people think that they're cute. When I look at them, I don't see it as much. Although...

I'm more familiar with them now, and I think they're kind of growing on me. I think I'm starting to feel that they are cute. Once you have more exposure, that can happen. I think that thing's going to kill me in the night. I really do. I felt the same way about Furbies, too. I never understood the Furby thing. But I don't know. Part of me, I think, generally when someone tells me that something is cute.

Or like I'm being, it's being marketed to me as a cute thing. Right. There's some part of me that I guess subconsciously resists that. Whereas if we're talking about like a living being, I'm all over it. When it's a live-in thing, it's a different matter. There was a famous dog in Japan, Wasao, who was famous because he was so ugly. The ugliest dog in Japan.

But people loved him because he was a dog. You know, he didn't know he was ugly. He was enthusiastic and lively and loved people. And so he became famous all over the country because of that. So really, the dog was cute. Yes, the dog was cute. Because he acted cute. And the gap between his appearance and his actions made it super cute. Just enhanced the cuteness. I think that's what LeBubu fans feel. Like there's a certain gap.

in the appearance of Lububu between what you expect as cute and what you're actually presented with. But for people who are into Lububu, it just enhances the cuteness to see that gap. For the rest of us, we don't like it so much. I was just trying to think about the things that I thought were cute. And the only thing that I could come up with was when children wear bow ties. And I don't...

It's just like the only thing, but, but other than like things in my own family, like I think my cat is very cute, but like for me, cuteness is, it's not. It's not a way something looks, but more like a way I feel about it, if that makes any sense. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, if you can feel that you have a relationship to a cute object, it definitely enhances the cuteness.

This is true even if the relationship is only in your mind, like if it's an object and not a living thing. This is the reason that Hello Kitty has a backstory, even if it's only three sentences, because people can feel closer to something cute.

if they know something a little bit more about it and can form a relationship to it in their mind. Wait, what's the three-sentence Hello Kitty backstory? Oh, yes. She's from London. Her name is Kitty White, and she's... five apples tall i hope i have the right number of apples there hate to get that wrong

What was your gateway to studying cuteness? How did this become your area? Oh, yeah. Well, I had been in Tokyo for quite a while already. So I knew about the cute culture here, kawaii, as they say in Japan. But I never really paid that much attention to it. And then one day I walked out of my apartment.

And you know those road construction barriers, like orange and white stripes telling you not to go into dangerous areas? I walked out of my apartment, and all of those had been replaced with lines of Hello Kitties holding rainbows.

And at first I thought, you know, okay, it's just another tie-up with Sanrio, the company that makes Hello Kitty. But then I noticed a lot of other construction barriers that were like blue leaping dolphins or... green smiling frogs it just happened everywhere all at once and I just thought something's going on here like this would never happen at home and I started seeing it more and more and I predict that after our conversation today

you and Ben will also go out and notice more and more cuteness because the rest of the world is catching up. Plenty of biologists had studied cuteness, but in the humanities, it was relatively undiscussed, unlike cuteness's classier cousin, beauty. So Joshua set out to change that.

and bring together researchers from across the disciplines whose work touched on cuteness. When I started studying this, all of the work on cuteness stressed that we feel things are cute because children need nurturing and care. Which is true. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, this is not the whole story. There are other reasons why we find things are cute. If one of them is care, then the other one is play.

Let me ask you a question. Which is cuter, a six-month-old baby or a six-day-old baby? Six months. Is my answer. No, I think probably, well, I would say a six-day-old baby. I think it also depends on whether or not you're thinking of your own children when you answer that question. Because there are other chemical responses in the brain for parents that make them need to take care of newborns. But for the rest of us, six-month-old babies are...

cuter surveys have demonstrated. And that's the age when children get old enough to sort of engage more with the world. And so cuteness unlocks all of these social behaviors in our brain. And makes us want to get closer to things and connect with things and communicate with them. And also stimulates the pleasure centers of our brain, but also lowers stress and anxiety.

It just makes people feel more comfortable when they're around cute things. And I think that that's one reason that cuteness has become so ubiquitous in our 21st century culture. Our 21st century understanding of cuteness echoes a theory from the 20th century. In the 1940s, Austrian animal behavior scientist Konrad Lorenz identified what he called the baby schema.

A set of physical traits that, he theorized, automatically trigger our caregiving responses. And even though Joshua thinks cuteness is as much about bonding and play as it is about nurturing, he's got to hand it to Lorenz.

The baby schema still tracks. For the most part, if we see these characteristics that young children and also baby animals have, you know, large head relative to body size, large eyes, sort of broad forehead, short... stubby arms and legs wobbly movements things like that then we're very likely to feel that that thing is cute i went to a few african countries earlier this year

which is not a humble brag. It's just a brag brag. I was very lucky to get to do it. And I saw so many baby animals. And when I see something that is very, very cute, I like get this. I don't know if it's like I bite my tongue or something, but I always have this like clench reaction where I feel like I'm just going to explode. And if I don't bite my tongue, I don't know what I'm going to do. And there was someone else on the trip, too, who kept just saying like.

I want to put it in my mouth. And we have these kind of weird physical reactions to cuteness. And I know that you're looking at this more from a humanities perspective, but is there anything in your...

your work that explains maybe that more physical reaction that some of us at least have to cuteness? Well, scientists call that reaction cute aggression. And only about half of adults have it, so I think you're lucky. It's like cute overload. It's so cute that you can't stand it. And so we get all these physical responses. Our vocal pitch rises and our teeth tend to clench, our fists clench. And we're just like, it's so cute, it's so cute, it's so cute. Like that.

The important thing to note with that is that the name cute aggression is a bit of a misnomer. It's not quite the right name because it suggests that we want to behave aggressively towards the cute object. Kind of seems like that if you say, I want to put it in my mouth. That's kind of aggressive. But the point is we don't actually do those things. Because one of the earliest lessons we teach children is that don't squeeze the puppy too hard, right? We know that that will...

you know, that will kill the cute objects, so we can't do it. And so I think that the aggressive response comes back on us and we take it out on ourselves. So that's why there's all these reactions like tensing muscles and clenching teeth, because we know we can't exercise this impulse onto the cute object. So it rebounds back on us in order to keep the cute object safe.

Wow. I've never thought about it like that. That makes so much sense that it's like, I can't, I can't do this to the creature. So I'm just going to like. So you do it to yourself. Hurt myself. Yes. Whoa. The rest of this episode is so cute. You could just eat it right up in a minute. Wayfair's big sale is returning. Get ready for Wayday. For four days only, score up to 80% off all things home with free shipping on everything. From October 26th through 29th, score Wayfair's best deals.

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I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people. Killing each other. All Her Fault. A new series streaming now, only on Peacock. Our English word, cute, has its own origin story.

Cute comes from acute, you know, sharp, cunning. And for quite a long time, until the 19th century, when you saw the word cute, it was simply a shortened form of acute, and it meant a cunning person. And not a particularly pleasant way. Someone who might cheat you is cute. And it only switched in the late 19th century when a new word was needed to describe this upsurge in popular culture of...

And so cute sort of was repurposed and became the cute that we know today. Maybe in American cute, there's still a little echo of the old. clever or cunningness. Like I think of, I don't know, American cartoons often are sort of funny or goofy and they just have a little twist to it. And in that I see an echo of the older meaning. Yeah, there's like some mischief to it that is cute for some reason. Exactly.

Mickey Mouse has some mischievous moments, as do Minions, the little hyperactive yellow characters from Disney's Despicable Me. Maybe mischief is part of the appeal of La Boo Boo's, with their big grins and doe eyes. In fact, Pop Mart even released a special series of La Boo Boo's called The Mischief Diaries. It featured a...

Labubu Cupid with his bow and arrow drawn, looking ready to cause some chaos. Cute is a relatively new word compared to kawaii. The Japanese have celebrated kawaii for centuries. It comes from the word for face and the word for flushed and dazzled, the way you might feel when seeing something cute. The word kawaii has been called the most popular word in the Japanese language.

most commonly used word and most popular word. So you just hear it all the time every day. People are just sort of into kai and predisposed to think about it. I think there's a few reasons for that. And one of them is... That to say something is cute, it's not only a conversation opener, it can also continue a conversation. And it can do so in a way that's not divisive and doesn't...

make people angry or aggressive. It's just a way to pass the time. And I think people enjoy it. One of the earliest examples of kawaii in the digital age are emojis. In the 1980s, Japanese schoolgirls used a popular, cute, shorthand sort of writing where they rounded their characters, included little pictures. Their teachers hated this cutesy handwriting and found it hard to read, which of course, in turn, made it.

incredibly popular. Companies used it in ad campaigns, and Apple Macintosh even added it as a font. But by the mid-1990s, girls in Japan had a new tool to communicate. Even before cell phones came out, there were pagers. And mostly pagers were intended for use by, you know, doctors on call or businessmen. But in Japan...

The parents started buying them for their children to keep track of them, especially girls. And when girls got the pagers, they realized they could send messages to their friends on them. And so they started to use little esky characters like a colon and a parenthesis for a smile. They had a whole language using those characters.

And these pagers also had primitive emoji that they used as well. So when cell phones came, each cell phone provider in Japan had its own emoji palette. And the people who used it the most were teenage girls. When Apple launched the iPhone in Japan around 2007, it was a complete flop because it had no emoji. So Apple got together with Google and they created an international standard for emoji. And that's the emoji we use today.

Why do you think things like cat videos were early viral hits? Yeah, once social media came, and previous to that, the internet in general, and YouTube especially, cuteness just exploded. And I think one reason for that... is not just that cuteness is easily shareable, because a lot of things are, but think about the difference between receiving a picture of somebody eating a delicious meal and receiving a picture of a really cute cat.

you cannot eat that meal. You can't bite into that steak when you're looking at the picture. So you feel a little bit of envy. But when you look at the picture of the cat, yeah, you can't pet the cat, but you can look at the cat and you can feel cuteness. So a cute picture or a cute video gives you something. It doesn't... remind you that you're lacking something. And I think that's the biggest reason why cuteness just spread so quickly around the world.

Joshua's written how the 20th century belonged to American cuteness. Mickey Mouse and the rest of the Disney characters, Shirley Temple, the Peanuts. But the 21st century might belong to Kauai. I think that the American cuteness that spread in the 20th century was largely top-down, like Disney.

Now with kawaii in the 21st century, we have a lot of user content being generated. It's more like a bottom-up phenomenon. So yes, of course, we have Hello Kitty and many other cute characters made by corporations. But there's also cuteness in fashion, and there's cuteness all over social media, and people are generating their own content. And of course, they also use the previous American cute aesthetic, but I can see more and more...

touches of Japanese kawaii appearing in all of these manifestations. You can see it in the color scheme, maybe a little bit less bold colors and more pastel. You can see it in character design, like really big. sparkly eyes in many, many aspects. So I think it's going to continue. I think Kawaii is the next worldwide huge hit. Do you think that this is a good thing?

Like this change, even if it means we're really inundated by Lububu memes? Why do you feel optimistic about the future of cuteness online? Well, I think that overall... Cuteness is a biological phenomenon that evolved because we need to take care of unsocialized children. And it does things to our brain, like activates the reward centers in our brain and makes us more social.

and lowers our stress. Those qualities are what attract most people. And I think those are the things going forward that are going to be characteristic of the new cute culture. And in that sense, I'm optimistic. Joshua, what's the cutest thing in your apartment? My cat. Oh, okay. Fast answer. Hands down. What's your cat's name and can you describe your cat's cuteness to us? Toby.

In Japanese, Tobiru means to jump or fly. He's very good at jumping. He's just an ordinary tabby cat, a rescue cat, but I love him. There you go. All you need is a three-sentence backstory, it turns out, for all cats. Cat-related cuteness. How many apples tall would you say, Toby? When he stretches out, he's really long, actually. I'm always surprised.

Like at least a seven apple cat, I would say, stretched out. All right. Seven apple cat. There you go. Seven apples long. Thank you so much, Joshua. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. And it's a fun topic. So thank you. Sure, no problem at all. Thanks for having me on. Endless Thread is a cute-ass production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter, hosted by me, Ben Kauai Johnson.

And me, Anne-Marie Lefoufou. Lefoufou. You're more of a Lefoufou. Lefoufou. You're more of a Pazuzu. What's Pazuzu again? That's like the possessed overlord? Yeah, the possessed demon from Mesopotamia. Love it. And me, Anne-Marie Pazuzu-Sievertson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, our production manager, Paul Vykus, and managing producer, Samita Joshi.

who is 74 apples tall. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and lafufus. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell in emojis, hit us up, endlessthread at wbur.org. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month. Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three,

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