Man has to wear Ninja Turtle suit to his wedding after joke tweet goes viral

San Francisco

Pranksters and self-promoters have gotten pretty good at engineering virality on the social Web. But Nic Vargus says that’s not what he did this week — honest.

On 26 August, the 27-year-old writer dropped a joke tweet that’s since been heard around the Internet. It’s been retweeted so many thousands of times, in fact, that he and his long-time girlfriend, Lindsey Oakes, may actually have to abide by it.

“Originally, the whole thing was completely a joke. I wrote the tweet, sent it and then went and grabbed coffee. By the time I came back, it had something like 40 retweets and I texted Lindsey. Right away, she was amicable and neither of us actually thought it would break 100k — so we just sort of laughed about it and she agreed to the bet,” he said. “She texted me several times throughout the day to see where the tweet was at.”

When he woke up the next day, it had hit 30,000, and a moment later Dan from the band Bastille retweeted it. “We absolutely love that band, so that was actually pretty special for Lindsey and me. A few minutes later, Seth Rogen retweeted it, which boggles the mind. I think a bunch of other celebrities got behind it, but by that time Twitter couldn’t really handle the information,” Nic said. It went from 70,000 to 100,000 in several minutes.

Nic said that when he marries Lindsey, he would be wearing the turtle suit for sure. “I’m really hoping for something custom-made,” he added.