Most likely one of the programmers was a fan of Monty Python, or perhaps one of the other older references to being hit by a fish. It wasn’t the only action command, just a weird one that lives on.

Here’s an interesting dive into the idea of action commands and how they’ve evolved into things like emojis and netspeak common today.

Man that takes me back. Trout slapping was a huge thing on IRC in the 90’s. I never understood why.

Edit: Apparently from Monty Python. Of course.

It was a Monty Python reference and common IRC joke.

I would make bots that would just go around and slap random people with fish lol

I also wrote a contextual menu that was nothing but scripts for slapping the selected user with a wide variety of fish.

12 year old me was a fucking dork.

Why wouldn’t it have