By November 2008, the meme had become mainstream enough that the MTV Europe Music Awards ran an online poll for “Best Act Ever” — a category distinct from the regular award categories — and Rick Astley won it, the result of a coordinated fan-vote campaign that was itself a rickrolling in spirit: directing an unexpected outcome to an unexpected place. He didn’t attend the ceremony. An actor appeared in his place wearing a Rick Astley mask.
On November 27, 2008, Astley appeared in person at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, performing — or more precisely, appearing to lip-sync — “Never Gonna Give You Up” from a float. The parade reaches a television audience of tens of millions. The Daily Telegraph subsequently called it possibly the most widely seen rickroll in history. He was there, in person, at the parade, performing the song he hadn’t performed publicly in years, to an audience that included many millions of people who were encountering the original version of the joke — the human being behind the video — for the first time.
It was surreal, and he seems to have experienced it as such. By his subsequent accounts, he approached the rickrolling phenomenon with a combination of genuine amusement and the philosophical distance that his decade away from pop stardom had given him. He was not wounded by it. He was not triumphant about it. He found it funny, particularly the cleverer instances — the Obama speech edits, the elaborate setups that required real effort to construct before anyone fell for them.