The baby is laughing. And now he is not. He’s seated in a high chair, dressed in a white suit and a large blue bib. His father is in the kitchen with him. In a high-pitched voice, Dad says, “Bing!” The baby laughs hysterically. Dad waits a few beats, until the baby is calm, and then, in a low voice, he says, “Dong.” This catches the baby by surprise. He laughs even harder. Dad hits him one more time with the high voice: “Bing!” The baby sputters, he wheezes, he can’t take it. He is helpless with laughter. And we love him for it.

The clip, titled “Hahaha,” is one of the most watched YouTube videos ever, with close to 100 million views since it went up, in 2006. It’s a classic of the form, so perfectly representative of the YouTube aesthetic that Google executives showed it to Queen Elizabeth during her visit to the company’s central-London headquarters. “Lovely little thing, isn’t it?,” Her Majesty said.

Lovely, indeed. But it’s also true that the “Hahaha” video is part of a broader cultural movement defined by a special fascination with all things cute—a movement that has sprung to life against a backdrop of war, economic breakdown, and more Wi-Fi.

Cootchie-coo behavior used to be reserved for private moments in the home. But now, with the Internet’s help, people feel free to wallow in cuteness en masse, in the company of strangers. The serious political blog Daily Kos, for instance, is awash in cute pictures of kittens and panda bears. The Web site Cute Overload, which gets 100,000 visits a day, is all photographs and videos of puppies (“puppehs” in the site’s own particular argot), kittens (“kittehs”), and baby rabbits (“bun-buns”), who are said to go nom-nom-nom as they munch their little meals.

“It’s part of our DNA to react to cute things,” says Meg Frost, who founded Cute Overload in 2005. “What makes me post certain pictures is if I have an audible reaction—a squeal—when I see the picture. I’m kind of annoyed at myself for having no control over thinking these things are so cute. It’s like ‘Oh, why don’t you just kill us with your fur?’”

The popularity of Cute Overload (and the more than 150 other cute-animal sites catalogued by the recommendation engine StumbleUpon, including Stuff on My Cat, Cute Things Falling Asleep, Kittenwar, and I Can Has Cheezburger) reflects a growing self-infantilization that is also in evidence at the social-networking site Facebook, where countless subscribers have posted photos of themselves as babies on their profile.

Vice, a hipster publication and Web site based in Brooklyn, has also gotten in on the cute act, with a Web channel called The Cute Show. With an un-ironic focus on cute animals, The Cute Show would not seem to belong in the company of other Vice programming, such as Inside Afghanistan and The Vice Guide to Sex.

It’s not just a digital thing. In this cuteness-crazed environment, Time Warner’s People magazine decided it was good business to shell out an estimated $6 million for photos of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony’s newborn twins. At the same time, Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Katie Holmes, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gwen Stefani have kept the supermarket tabloids afloat through the power of their spawn. And it’s no accident that the biggest tabloid saga of the year concerns Jon and Kate Gosselin, who rode to fame on the backs of their eight little cuties.

cuteness alert! cried the Hollywood Gossip Web site in a recent headline running above a snapshot of Matt Damon and his “adorable little ladies,” ages nine months and two years, photographed near Central Park. The caption that ran with the photo might be our new cultural credo: “Everybody together now ... Wait for it ... Awwww!”

Even our cars are getting cuter. The Mini Cooper, one of the cutest things ever to hit pavement, entered the U.S. market in 2002. Seven years and one economic collapse later, it perfectly suits the changing image of a country in which General Motors, the maker of the Cadillac, filed for bankruptcy and sold its Hummer line to Tengzhong, a company based in China. The Mini’s main competition, the Smart car (a brand so cute its name is rendered in lowercase letters in its logo), was introduced into the U.S. last year by Mercedes-Benz/Daimler. If you want one, you need to get on a waiting list. At 1,808 pounds, it is the smallest car domestically available. “If you look at it from the front, with the position of the grill and the headlights, it looks like it’s smiling,” says Smart spokesman Ken Kettenbeil.

And Darth Vader does not lie beyond the reach of cuteness. The ultimate movie villain of the last three decades is now available as a cuddly plush toy. “Squeeze him into your world today!” says the ad copy.

In this atmosphere, it’s no surprise that the most monstrously profitable company of our time has a name that could have been made up by a five-month-old: Google. Twitter, another hot digital entity with a babyish name, has reduced even Shaquille O’Neal to peppering his postings with cute emoticons.

:(...

That’s me crying over the depressing rise of cuteness.

To some degree, we can’t help ourselves. In the 1940s, ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed—correctly, as it turns out—that we instinctively want to nurture any creature that has a cute appearance. “Lorenz suggested that infantile characteristics—big head, big eyes, the very round face—stimulate caretaking behavior,” says Marina Cords, a professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University. “I study blue monkeys in Kenya every year and I have the same reaction. I find the infants are very cute. I was taught by my adviser never to tell anybody that was a motivation for anything we do, which is true. But it’s hard not to have that gut reaction.”

A deer and kitty have a moment–so cute!

A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and it has resulted in two groundbreaking papers published in the journals Ethology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, Glocker’s series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

“It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, “which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli.”

Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting. So it makes sense that videos centered on babies and young animals have amassed more than a billion clicks on YouTube. This is not just a case of kids watching kid stuff, either: more than 80 percent of the people who go to YouTube are at least 18 years old, according to the site’s own demographics study.

Big business is not blind to the power of cute. A good example is the subtle evolution of the signature advertising character of the last decade, the geico Gecko. In 1999, when the creature made its debut, it was a slithery reptile that walked on all fours. Since then its creators at the Martin Agency, an advertising firm based in Richmond, Virginia, have transformed it into something much cuter: the little guy is now fully anthropomorphized, with a more rounded head, big eyes, and other characteristics we unconsciously associate with infants who need our care.

The gecko’s cuteness tricks you into forgetting that it represents something that’s not cute in the slightest—a giant insurance company, which must deal in matters most uncuddly, such as injury, death, and arguments over claim payments.

In a 1979 article for Natural History, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould noted a similar metamorphosis with Mickey Mouse. Little by little, Gould wrote, the character evolved from the thin, cackling rodent of the silent-film era to the high-voiced, plump-headed figure of the 1950s and beyond. So as the Walt Disney Company grew more powerful and profitable, its public face grew cuter.

There is probably no such thing as an uncomplicated cute image. As the essayist Daniel Harris argued persuasively in his 2000 book, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, our enjoyment of adorable stuff has a hidden dark side.

“The process of conveying cuteness to the viewer disempowers its objects, forcing them into ridiculous situations and making them appear more ignorant and vulnerable than they really are,” Harris writes. “Adorable things are often most adorable in the middle of a pratfall or a blunder.” He mentions Winnie-the-Pooh’s getting his head stuck in a beehive as an example and goes on to argue that children themselves are not really so cute; cuteness, instead, is something we do to them. (Think of the Zach Galifianakis character in The Hangover outfitting the little baby with sunglasses.)

Like everybody else, Harris has a family member who sends him cute images via e-mail. “My sister sends me things that are practically sadistic,” he says. “What was the thing she sent me? Accidents of cats! Jumping through things and not quite making it. It was very much in keeping with my point about the sadism of cuteness.” In his view, the Internet has not changed what we find cute. “But there is a change in the availability of these images,” he says. “The medium has made us hungrier for this stuff.”

Harris’s linking of cuteness and sadism applies to the famous “Hahaha” video: the baby may be cute on his own, but the clip heightens his vulnerability by presenting him more or less trapped in a high chair and reduced to a hysterical powerlessness by his father’s sly utterances of “Bing” and “Dong.” “There is something dark about using children for the pleasure of our maternal needs,” Harris says. “We enjoy being caretakers so much that we will create situations in which they need our care.”

The rather sick power relationship between lovers of cuteness and the objects of their gaze figures in one of the top-grossing films of ’09: the widower of Up is adorable not only because his advanced age has left him in need of care, but because the filmmakers place this little old man in the extended pratfall of being stuck in his pastel-painted cottage as it floats to South America on a treacherous journey. As the story unfolds, it turns into a weird ballet of needy characters: the clumsy, chubby boy with an absent father; the slavish, awkward dog, who craves affection; the endangered snipe bird, which is pursued by the film’s villain and imperiled further by a wounded leg; and her baby birds, who tug on our heartstrings because of their frankly cute appearance and because they are in constant danger of losing their mommy. Up mercilessly exploits our need to nurture helpless things.

I was further reminded of Harris’s theory while checking out a blog called You Can’t Make It Up. One of its posts presents 50 photos of small animals with broken limbs wearing casts. The keeper of the blog said she couldn’t resist the pictures, because of their “bittersweet sadness and heart-splosioning adorablosity.”

It seems like nothing is immune to cuteness, not even death. At mass-murder sites, by sharp bends in the road, and on the streets outside the homes of recently departed celebrities—that is, wherever somebody has met an untimely end—plump teddy bears and colored balloons magically appear in a sickly sweet tribute to the deceased.

There are also cute pop-music acts, like the British girl singer Bat for Lashes, who appears in a video riding a child’s bicycle in the company of people in animal costumes. Another example is the precious and precise indie group the Bird and the Bee, which has given us “Love Letter to Japan,” a song that pays homage to Japan’s kawaii, or cute, culture. In addition, singer-songwriters Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles melted hearts in the cold months of 2008 with “Winter Song,” a homey duet that spawned a cute accompanying video, in which the two singers appeared as cartoon characters rendered in Hello Kitty style. Unlike harmless bands from earlier eras—the Monkees, the Osmonds, New Edition, Backstreet Boys, ’NSync—the cute acts of today aren’t controlled by a corporation or impresario looking to cash in; they’re cute by choice.

A dog in a dress–adorb!

Long before the age of cute, when cool was king, NBC talk-show host Steve Allen poked a hole in Elvis Presley’s then dangerous public image by having him sing “Hound Dog” directly to a basset hound. Now bands are happy to give themselves the cute treatment: an emo-ish pop group out of Buffalo, named Cute Is What We Aim For, recently put out a video for a song called “Doctor” that stars a pug puppy. The old pose of coolness is no longer so cool: the better move is to appear unthreatening. Veteran alternative-rock band Weezer, keeping up with changing times, has recently endorsed a cute product, the Snuggie, the blanket that you wear, of which more than four million have been sold.

Maybe the move toward cuteness has come about partly because the idea of “edge” has gotten old. We used to romanticize tortured souls like Dylan Thomas, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, but their equivalents from recent years—Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Heath Ledger, David Foster Wallace—have elicited expressions of pity more than anything else.

Sigh.

Cuteness has also insinuated its way into our lives by way of our taste buds and stomachs. The nationwide hunger for what may be the cutest food item in culinary history, the cupcake, seems to have kicked in around 2005. A studied childishness is a big part of the cute movement, and the cupcake’s surge in popularity is a reversion to the gustatory pleasures of that time in our lives when sweet plus soft plus damp equaled yummy.

Gourmet-cupcake boutiques have recently opened in Dallas, Detroit, Birmingham, Cambridge, Indianapolis, Georgetown, Brooklyn, and Tacoma. And Martha Stewart held a “cutest cupcake” photo contest.

The miniature cakes are also becoming a staple of that old rite of passage to adulthood, the wedding. Writing for examiner.com, a D.C. event planner reported that, in 2008, “it seemed that every other wedding we did, the couple chose to have a cupcake tower in lieu of the traditional wedding cake.”

And then there’s birthday-cake-flavored ice cream. Adults are swooning over a flavor meant to put you in mind of a birthday party you attended at age 11. In the last few years, Baskin-Robbins, Ben & Jerry’s, Schoep’s, Mayfield, and Edy’s have all come out with their take on the flavor.

For generations, kids couldn’t wait until they reached adulthood so they could smoke, drink, eat four-course meals, make money, drive cars, have sex, and, if they were the type to join the military, legally kill other human beings. Now we would rather log on and tune out, preferably in the womb-like comfort of a Snuggie, which is the perfect thing to wear as we gaze at photos of kittens while gnawing on delicious cupcakes.

Nom-nom-nom.

Popular culture never comes out of a vacuum. It reflects or acts as a foil to the times. So why all the cuteness? And why now? Everybody would probably agree that the aughts have been an ugly decade. But why should it give rise to “kittehs” and “puppehs”?

The 1930s were as bad as it gets, but in those days Hollywood turned out one zesty screwball comedy after another. Those movies were surely escapist, but in a manner tougher and more vibrant than the cultural products emerging from the give-up culture of cuteness. Cute culture is soft and brain-deadening. It privileges the inner child, who, necessarily, has awful taste.

To be fair, the 1930s also gave us Shirley Temple, who pouted her way into the hearts of audiences in need of an escape more sugary than the one provided by the screwball ethos. Her Depression-era stardom, furthermore, hints that, in hard times, people get in the mood to take a ride on the Good Ship Lollipop.

The same weirdness is afoot once more. In a decade that has slapped us with a recession in the wake of 9/11 and an unending war waged in two theaters, Americans are producing a popular culture that seems to be saying, Please like us.

During the Bush years, the American image went from that of protector to invader, from defender of human rights to aggressor on the lookout for loopholes in the Geneva Conventions. It stands to reason that popular cuteness came about as some sort of correction, as a way for us to convince ourselves and our friends that we’re not as bad as our recent national actions have made us seem. Cuteness got its start as a cowardly form of resistance, a velvet rebellion led by smiley-face emoticons.

Whether he deserves it or not, Barack Obama has consistently been portrayed as cute. As the presidential campaign heated up in 2007, the viral Internet song-and-video “I Got a Crush on Obama” cast him as the kind of guy worthy of the tweenish outpouring of emotion conveyed by the word “crush.” Once he won the election, things got even more cloying. In April of this year, the liberal Web site Huffington Post polled its readers to determine “Obama’s cutest moments.” The accompanying slide show included photographs of Obama with the Easter Bunny, Obama leading Bo the puppy down a gleaming White House hallway, and Obama crinkling his nose while dancing with the First Lady at an inaugural ball. A typical HuffPo commenter responded to the photos like this: “Sigh! They’re all adorable!”

It’s almost enough to make you nostalgic for Dick Cheney.

The Beanie Babies people got in on the act by manufacturing dolls in the likeness of the Obama girls as part of the Ty Girlz line. They were called “Marvelous Malia” and “Sweet Sasha.” Following a complaint by Michelle Obama, the toy manufacturer renamed the dolls “Marvelous Mariah” and “Sweet Sydney.” Unable to resist the market for Obama-inspired cuteness, the Beanie Babies company jumped back into action within days of Bo joining the Obama household, pumping out “Bo,” a stuffed black-and-white puppy.

There are also Obama pajamas, called Ojamas. They’re soft and covered in little Obama faces. In Japan, a sushi chef created an Obama sushi roll, assembling a likeness of the president’s face with raw fish, rice, and seaweed. Closer to home, at Trophy Cupcakes in Seattle, the cute-ification of the commander in chief turned up in the shop’s popular Obama cupcakes, which have the president’s face rendered in frosting.

But don’t cute kitsch items greet every presidency? No. Have you ever seen a Rutherford B. Hayes doll? And George W. Bush never got the cute treatment. Even his Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley, failed to stimulate much caretaking behavior outside the White House. A typical Bush moment, vis-à-vis cuteness, occurred in 2008, when Barney bit a White House reporter. Chomp.

An image from the early days of the Obama White House demonstrated the change in atmosphere that went with the changing of the guard: a cameraman captured a mother duck and her ducklings as they waddled across the White House lawn.

For a few days afterward, it was all over the Web, a photographic antidote to the key images of the Bush years: the flaming towers; the president standing with the mission accomplished banner at his back; the shot of the hooded detainee that emerged from the moral and political wreckage of Abu Ghraib. In June, Big Media completed the makeover when NBC News presented Inside the Obama White House, a program that gave inordinate camera time to Bo.

If cuteness rose up partly in reaction to the muscular Bush policies, it has now moved into the seat of power, with the arrival of a president who lends himself to cute treatment. What was once countercultural has become part of the culture.

Cuteness is also creeping into our language. At Urban Dictionary, a wiki site packed A to Z with new slang posted by its users, you can find huge swaths of screen space devoted to words rooted in cuteness. The definitions and examples give you the feeling that America’s bootstrap toughness is heading into the sunset. There are the annoying standby words used by adult bloggers in otherwise serious posts, such as “awwww” and “yay.” There is also the word “cutegasm,” which an Urban Dictionary user has defined as “the reaction one feels when being exposed to something overly cute. this may be an emotional, physical or even sexual response.” Here’s the example: “When Holly saw the baby trying to dance, she had a cutegasm.”

What is the antonym for “cutegasm”? Because that’s what I’m having right now.

The “Hahaha” video, which has been watched almost 100 million times on YouTube.

Going along with “awwww” and “yay” and “cutegasm” is the continuance of the social phenomenon known as the “cuddle party.” I thought this was something invented by the editors of The Onion, circa 2005, but it’s real and it’s going strong. The Cuddle Party organization has had more than 15 get-togethers this year, in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, Georgia, California, and Alabama. You pay roughly $30 per person to lie down with other people for a session of fully clothed hugging (nothing more, pervert). Similarly, social hugging among teenagers has become so widespread that, as The New York Times reported earlier this year, some principals have banned it from high-school hallways.

There has also been a sharp rise in cute movies. For the past decade, the annual list of the 50 highest-grossing films has included between 7 and 13 productions with adorable cartoon heroes (among them Up, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Ratatouille) or lovable animals (Marley & Me, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Hotel for Dogs). There have always been movies for kids, but in the 1990s, by contrast, there were four or five cute movies per year among those cracking the top 50. And when critics review films like Up or Wall-E, their tone suggests they’re dealing with something like The Seventh Seal rather than movies designed to exploit our caretaking instinct.

While all this cuteness was snowballing, the reversion to childishness manifested itself in domestic candy sales, which rose significantly in 2008, even as consumers denied themselves other small pleasures in a worsening economy. Cadbury reported a jump in profits of 30 percent. Nestle’s increased by 10.9 percent.

At the same time, interestingly, the U.S. suicide rate was on the rise, following a long decline. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of U.S. suicides totaled 29,350 in 2000, which was the final year of the happy sex farce that was the Clinton presidency. In 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, 33,300 Americans offed themselves.

At decade’s end, the stats suggest, America is a nation in need of a hug, a Snickers, and the nucleus-accumbens squirt provoked by baby-animal photos, laughing-baby clips, and bathetic movies.

This is not really a surprise. Social misery and cuteness seem to be linked. The precedent we have in this area is Japan. A cuteness craze got started there, influenced strongly by the Disney films Bambi and Fantasia, in the defeated nation’s bleak postwar culture of the 1940s and 1950s. It has continued to the present, under the name kawaii.

Each Japanese prefecture these days has its own cute mascot, as do many big corporations. Public signs are filled with cute characters giving safety tips and other instructions. A few All Nippon Airways passenger jets are painted with the large yellow Pikachu character from the children’s anime series Pokémon. Known collectively as yuru-kyara, Japan’s funny mascots take part in cuteness competitions observed by expert judges.

American cuteness has certainly been influenced by the Japanese version. Gwen Stefani borrowed the kawaii look for her most recent solo concert tour. The creative head of Disney and Pixar, John Lasseter, is an acolyte of anime director Hayao Miyazaki’s, and it’s safe to say that every animated American movie of the last 10 years bears the stamp of Miyazaki. The blank-faced Hello Kitty character, from Japan’s $1-billion-a-year Sanrio company, has successfully infiltrated American culture, with fashion trendmonger Kimora Lee Simmons trumpeting the brand and Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, and other celebs wearing its accessories on the red carpet.

“Japan is the cute capital of the world—it’ll drive you nuts,” says a man who lives there part of each year, but who must remain anonymous because his wife is a Hello Kitty saleswoman. (The cute industry is hard on dissidents.) “When you get the cuteness here, it has usually been pets. But now that America is starting to get into the animation from Japan, it’s starting to seep in. It’s like a 10-year time lag. When I was in Japan 10 years ago, the cuteness wasn’t quite as bad as it is now. And now I see a lot of the same things in America that you saw in Japan back then.”

A cute character that emerged from the atomic waste was Astro Boy, who has gained a following in the U.S. through translated comic books and an old cartoon series. Created by manga genius Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy is a big-eyed, eager-to-please robot boy built by a scientist to replace his dead son. His name recalls the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: in Japanese he is not “Astro Boy” but “Mighty Atom.” Like his contemporary, Godzilla, he is atom-powered and capable of great destruction. At the time of his creation, Japan had to rely on the kindness of its conquerors to get back on its feet.

“There’s no doubt that cuteness has been a part of the Japanese aesthetic since the postwar years,” says Roland Kelts, the author of the 2006 book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. “One theory, which has been proposed by a lot of Japanese artists and academics, is that, after the humiliation and emasculation of Japan in the postwar years, Japan developed this quasi-queer position of ‘little brother’ or ‘little boy.’ If you become ‘little brother’ or ‘little boy,’ the only way you can get big brother’s or fat man’s attention is by being so cute or puppy-like that he has to take care of you.”

Just as Japan produced Mighty Atom and countless toys and gadgets out of what was, arguably, a desire to show its dependency, America is now coming up with cute products and images to express its own sense of need in the wake of the hard times and lousy decisions of the go-it-alone Bush administration.

“It is really important to understand the notion of dependency inherent in cuteness and how that emerged in Japan after the war,” says Kelts, whose mother grew up in occupied Japan and whose father is American-born.

This desire to “show the face of dependency,” as Kelts puts it, also turns up online, whenever people add cute-animal photos to their blogs or post baby pictures on their Facebook pages. “The old idea that you want your privacy is bleeding away into this new idea that you are desperate to be known,” he says. “And if you are desperate to be known, you need a strategy for being known, and a very good strategy is the old evolutionary one of being so cute that you need to be cared for. That was, in a sense, Japan’s position for the last 60 years: ‘We will make your products really, really well, and we’re going to be the best little boy you can imagine.’”

An adorable puppy.

Bringing things full circle is the Astro Boy movie, released in October, some 50 years after Tezuka pieced him together from the atomic rubble. It is strange, but possibly correct, to think that every time we gaze on a cute image these days we are seeing some weird aftereffect of World War II. The cuteness created by our bombs has come back to seduce us.

A quick aside: maybe the cuteness has come for us because of the huge change we’ve gone through in the last decade in terms of our relationships with our machines. Those born in the 1960s or earlier remember a time when (even as full-fledged adults) they did not have something beeping in their pocket, a time when they were not tethered to the Web, a time when they could be truly alone. It’s not a new thing to note that machines have become an integral part of middle-class life in our increasingly digital age. But maybe this is another reason for the cuteness craze. Maybe the same anxiety that has given rise to the Matrix movies, to the latest Bruce Willis action vehicle, Surrogates, and even to highbrow works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s lovely novel Never Let Me Go is in play whenever we take solace in the kittens and puppies of sites like Cute Overload or Cute Things Falling Asleep, or turn our iPod wheels to the unthreatening and unmechanized sounds of Sara Bareilles. The cuteness craze may represent a nostalgia for a lost world. Or maybe we’re trying, in some pathetic way, to animate our machines, to imbue them with sounds and images that strike at the deepest part of what it means to be human: our desire to take care of helpless creatures. We’re like those office workers of the 1960s and 1970s who tried to beat back the alienation they felt as a result of being the first people to inhabit sterile-seeming cubicles eight hours a day by putting up that poster of the cute little kitten hanging from the tree.

You can take only so much sweetness before you crave something salty. A correction is under way. A popular YouTube video, made by the Internet comedy show SecretSauce TV, satirizes cute culture with a fake trailer for an apocalyptic action movie called My Little Pony: Reign of Buttercup Sprinkles.

In roughly three minutes, the parody tells the story of numerous brightly colored ponies (based on the Hasbro toy line that has had a resurgence in recent years) taking over the world. The ponies fly, drive fast cars, and one of them even hoof-punches a human prisoner during an Abu Ghraib–style interrogation. The trailer then slows down to show a speech given by a black, Obama-like president, who somberly addresses a nation under attack: “We have ridden on their backs. We have bought them for our daughters, but now we must re-assert mankind’s authority and strike down these little ponies! Their armies shall arrive in a rainbow of colors.... They will smell of glitter and cotton candy. But make no mistake! This is a war between mankind and ponykind.”

Comedy Central’s South Park has also weighed in on the cuteness phenomenon with its own response to the much-viewed “Hahaha” YouTube video in an episode that includes the line “Shut your fucking mouth, laughing baby.” Despite the work of such skillful detractors, however, I would not doubt the power of cuteness. It will bat its lashes and crinkle its nose, and it will smother its critics with its softness.

Jim Windolf is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.