Lemon Party

The raunchy website wasn’t the first Lemon Party prank. That belongs to a joke, if briefly registered, political party in Canada in the late 1980s who promoted a “bitter Canada.” References to the party resurfaced in obscure memes in 2018.

Then along came the internet, with its Wild West of shock sites whose innocent titles tricked people into viewing graphic and pornographic images—a sort of bait-and-switch that rickrolled internet users. The so-called Unholy Trinity of the Internet included Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party, registered as www.lemonparty.org in 2002. (Visit at your own risk. Definitely NSFW.) People would tell their friends “to just type lemonparty” only to find a picture of three naked, elderly men having sex while Jimmy Soul’s 1963 song “If You Wanna Be Happy” played in the background.

In 2004, Lemon Party was Urban Dictionary official. In 2007, actors Michael Cera and Jonah Hill plugged Lemon Party while promoting their film Superbad. Popular culture has since widely referenced Lemon Party, including The Simpsons, 30 Rock, American Dad, and The Daily Show, sometimes just as a way to refer to gay elderly individuals having sex—and indeed, some folks have criticized Lemon Party for stigmatizing elderly and gay sex. In 2014, Dixon Cox (clearly a pseudonym) published an erotic novel, My First Lemon Party.

In 2013, the Lemon Party went up for sale. You could own a piece of internet history for just … $450,000! In 2018, electronic musician Sacha Robotti filed a lawsuit against his former managers, claiming they redirected his website to Lemon Party.