I couldn’t do Baby John justice if I had four columns to work with, so here’s the heavily truncated bio: John Richard Burgess was born in 1943. After leaving school, he became a professional ten pin bowler. He met John Laws at a bowling alley, one professional thing led to another, and by 1965 he was working at Sydney radio station 2UW as an announcer. This is where he got the nickname “Baby John”, which he has retained into his late 70s.

Much radio work ensued, and in the 1980s, he became the host of the TV show Wheel of Fortune. He did that for 12 years, then hosted Burgo’s Catch Phrase, another TV game show. Today he’s back on the radio (in Perth) but has developed a cult following on Twitter and Facebook, where he posts weekly jokes and musings.

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What do Baby John and TGIF have to do with each other? On social media, Burgess sticks pretty closely to a formula: weekly, he presents a joke ripped straight out of a 1980s book with a name like 1001 Thigh-Slappers Strictly For Dads. They’re mostly benign and the punchline usually consists of a pun or play on words. Think Rodney Dangerfield crossed with Groucho Marx but all written and with no spaces between the punctuation.

This all began in early 2018, and he was getting little attention. Then, on January 11, 2019, he committed a gag to digital print and appended “TGIF” in brackets. Scholars consider this his urtext.

He ground away at the content mill for the next month with little reward. Then on February 1, he again went with “TGIF” after a joke about his wife stuffing a handkerchief down his gob while jogging (“it’s kind of a ... running gag!” ). This one took off. It got nearly 1000 likes, 80 retweets and numerous responses.

By 2020, most jokes were getting the TGIF treatment and many were getting 100 likes or more. Tweeters from across Australia would respond with exclamatory delight, calling him “king”, telling him he’d “done it again” and thanking him for getting up to his “usual tricks”. Often they posted memes of basketballers completing powerful slam dunks and making it clear “that’s you, Burgo”. Now Baby John Burgess’s TGIF is something of a Twitter institution.

As for “Loving life. Living it to the fullest”, this sounds like something the man would say. In among the self-deprecation and kitsch wordplay, Burgess offers wisdom and reflections that sit just on the right side of the line dividing gentle warm-heartedness and saccharine sentimentality.

In summary, your colleague was referring to an internet meme relating to a 78-year-old game show host who once tweeted about Dwayne The Rock Johnson’s sex life. I trust that clears things up entirely.

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