The Globalization of Michael Rosen: How One British Dad’s ‘Nice’ Became the Planet’s Shared Sigh

Michael Rosen and the Global Echo of a British Dad Joke
By Our Man in the Departures Lounge

If you’ve recently heard a stranger on a Tokyo commuter train shout “Nice!” in an exaggerated Estuary accent, or watched a Colombian street vendor mime a frantic fridge-door mime, congratulations: you have witnessed the planet’s most improbable soft-power export since the Beatles discovered meditation. Michael Rosen—seventy-eight, former UK Children’s Laureate, and the only man alive who can weaponize the word “plums”—has become the lingua franca of post-ironic despair.

It began innocently enough. A grainy 2007 clip of Rosen performing his poem “Hot Food” was sliced, diced, and autotuned into oblivion by bedroom producers from Lagos to Lahore. The 1.2-second “Nice” now functions as a universal emotional modifier, like “OK” but with more existential fatigue. Type it under a video of a Ukrainian drone dropping a grenade into a foxhole and you’ll get 4,000 likes; paste it beneath footage of a Parisian café refusing to serve tap water and it still scans as commentary. Same syllable, same shrug—global comprehension in a single glottal stop.

Rosen himself is flattered, bewildered, and slightly worried. “I don’t even get royalties,” he told me over Zoom from a London kitchen that looked suspiciously like the one where he once impersonated a malfunctioning freezer. “But I suppose that’s what happens when your face becomes a reaction GIF in 47 languages. You’re everybody’s unpaid uncle.” The Chinese have dubbed him “Warm Grandpa”; in Finland he’s simply “Melancholy Rosen,” a brand of canned fish that briefly outsold pickled herring.

The implications are deliciously dystopian. While the BBC slashes foreign-language services and the British Council closes libraries faster than you can say “austerity,” Rosen’s disembodied grin has achieved the cultural penetration empire-builders once fantasized about. He is the last colonial administrator, only instead of gunboats he deploys fricatives and the memory of school dinners. Diplomats in Brussels report that “doing a Michael” is now shorthand for any diplomatic statement that sounds friendly but leaves a faint aftertaste of menace. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s English-language channels splice his voice into deepfakes warning NATO to “mind the gap”—a joke so layered it requires a PhD in post-Soviet semiotics to unpack.

Naturally, Silicon Valley wants in. A Bay Area start-up is training an AI voice clone to read bedtime stories in Rosen’s cadence—because nothing lulls a toddler like uncanny-valley communism. Not to be outdone, the EU has proposed a “Rosen Directive” requiring all memes to disclose emotional carbon footprints. The Japanese are selling Rosen-emblazoned tissue boxes that play a tiny “Noice” every time you blow your nose; sales spike during hay-fever season, proving once again that late capitalism can monetize even seasonal allergies.

Yet beneath the absurdity lies a darker truth. While Rosen’s visage circles the globe, the actual children he wrote for are growing up in refugee camps where the only English lesson available is a cracked phone looping “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” The poem’s refrain—“We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it”—has become a grim soundtrack to Mediterranean crossings. Somewhere in the algorithmic churn, laughter and lament swapped passports.

So what does it mean that a Jewish grandfather from Pinner has accidentally become the emoji for planetary ambivalence? Perhaps that culture no longer travels; it detonates. One minute you’re reciting verse to a hall of sugar-addled eight-year-olds, the next you’re a floating signifier in a geopolitical group chat, forever mid-chew on an invisible potato.

Rosen, ever the pragmatist, has started signing off emails with “Nice” in inverted commas, like a man who’s read his own post-mortem and found it slightly under-seasoned. “As long as nobody weaponizes ‘Chocolate Cake’ in a disinformation campaign,” he says, “I’ll call it a win.” Too late: the CIA has already filed a trademark application.

And that, dear reader, is how the world ends—not with a bang, but with a mouthful of imaginary hot potato cooling to room temperature while seven billion people hit “like.”