Internet

I KISS YOU!!!!! -- now, THE BACKLASH!!!!!

by Jason Gay

If you're online, chances are someone's already e-mailed you the URL for a home page supposedly belonging to a Turkish man named Mahir Cagri, a hyper-friendly, ample-nosed journalist with a taste for women, sex, photography, accordions, sunbathing, table tennis, and exclamation points.

Cagri's site (http://members.xoom.com/_XMCM/primall/mahir/081199.html), which begins with the ebullient greeting "WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE!!!!!!!!! I KISS YOU!!!!!", features photographs of the single, thirtysomething Turk interspersed with biographical tidbits in choppy English ("I like to take foto-camera" and "Who is want to come TURKEY, I can invitate . . . "). Earlier this month, the page became the craze of the wired world -- à la that stupid dancing-baby thing -- chalking up more than a million hits, spawning dozens of parodies, and winding up in the pages of the London Observer and Time. It didn't matter that the page turned out to be a practical joke perpetrated by a friend of Cagri's -- Mahir was an overnight Net star.

There are plenty of theories as to why Cagri's home page became such a phenomenon. Some of the appeal has to do with the earnestness of the host, who is disarmingly desperate about looking for love in all the world's places. Some of it probably stems from the charmingly crude design, especially in light of today's slicked-out, state-of-the-art Web sites.

Not to jerk our political-correctness knee too hard, but there's likely another, somewhat discomfiting reason for Mahir mania: people still get a big kick out of laughing at foreigners, especially goofy ones with broken English. The giggling over Cagri's page is really no different from the creepy laughs at the expense of Chinese and Pakistani restaurateurs on Seinfeld, or of Sirajul and Mujibur, the awkward Bangladeshi brothers who occasionally pop up for campy laughs on The Late Show with David Letterman. We're not suggesting that Cagri's site itself is ethnically insensitive (especially since it was put together by one of his own pals), but the idea of the mostly white-bread wired nation chuckling en masse about the clumsy musings of a foreigner strikes us as a little, well, creepy.

For now, however, just about everyone seems pretty cool about the joke. Especially Cagri, who's reportedly mulling over a movie deal based on his burst of Web fame. Aylin Acikalin, the assistant director of the Washington, DC-based Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, says that Turkish-Americans have "generally been reacting to this site with humor." Still, Acikalin says she's keeping a watch on the Web, "just in case" the laughs over Mahir turn a little ugly.