When we had all resigned to our fate of being inside, sometime around mid April, the mood shifted. We were still scared but we were to some degree functioning. We had figured out the difference between zoom and zoom pro. We had given ourselves little projects and home workouts and were trying our best to get through what we thought might be the next six weeks. On twitter we had our first honest to goodness pandemic meme. A popular meme was on the horizon from the first day we went into lockdown. And here’s what we have to show for it:
It’s bad! It’s ugly! It’s not funny! However you want to categorize it, it’s low level. No one could follow even the basic directions on the outset. The worst part is now, even a year later, people keep insisting how funny it was, how funny it still is.
A lot of dumb people who think they’re smart claim memes ruined their sense of humor, which they didn’t. They were never funny in the first place. A second group of dumb people who think they’re smart will then explain to the first group that it’s actually dadaist. Others will talk at length about how this is “shitposting” People in media who are too online love to say shitposting. Shitposting has gone the way of gaslight, grift, and narcissist as being overused to the point of no meaning. This “Go Piss Girl” meme was grabbed by these people.
Whether or not these memes are dadaist is beside the point. There is no need to justify why you find something funny. Something can be funny for a substantial reason that can be explained, set up, punchline or it can be funny for the pure reason that it makes you laugh. Mostly we should not be spend time trying to fully quantify why something is funny. Only why something is not.
But Kathryn, isn’t that exactly what you’re doing? Aren’t you over-intellectualizing memes to make yourself sound and feel smart? No, what I’m doing is different because I’m different and I’m special and its ok when I do it. Also I’m not explaining anything to anyone. I’m giving my opinion.
I hated this meme. It was not funny. It was not silly. It sucked. The point of the Jane Lynch meme was that it could say anything. This meme was originally an anagram. Then because people are bad at pattern recognition, they changed it to just saying anything. That’s not the point. I get that your brain is fried because of your email job but that's not an excuse. No one is making you make bad memes.
It was interminable. The unfunny. As the less online became the too online, which is a horrible pipeline that produces some of the worst twitter personalities, we were given the worst the internet had to offer. It was not dadaism, it was not shitposting, it was borderline random XD rawr means i love you in dinosaur.
If my desire to review and criticize memes is a survey of collective effort, this is the crown jewel of terrible collective effort. Everyone is contributing and none of it is good. A part of memes is recognizing the framework and working within it. We could not recognize the framework and therefore it was discarded.
Now is the point in the essay where I told myself to say something nice. I guess my nice sentiment would be that we can do better. We can do better with anagrams, we can do better with Gossip Girl, we can do better with Dadaist meme formats or whatever it is you people want to cloak silly internet jokes with. I do not think this is the height of our collective effort. We are all funnier than this. This format brought out the worst in everyone.