Social scientists of the future will probably find scholarly ways to analyse what makes a video go viral. Unexpectedness might well turn out to be one of the factors.

Several people on twitter have turned ten-year-old Mason Ramsey into an overnight internet sensation by posting videos of him (above) yodelling to Lovesick Blues by Hank Williams in an aisle at Walmart. No one looking for cereal and shampoo could possibly have expected this.

Since imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery – closely followed by memes – people at other Walmart stores promptly began to re-create the yodelling, as the videos below show: