Meme Report 12/22
Bah Humbug... But That's Too Strong
This week we had a pitiful showing on both major meme centric apps. I can’t even talk about Instagram. The omicron surge has been bad and scary, not only for real people in real life but also for content. I think we owe to it people with covid to create good content for them to laugh at. Doom scrolling can only get us so far and do so much. We have to actually effectively distract ourselves from all this if we’re going to survive it. If you don’t have covid and need to kill time online, try contributing to the meme ecosystem. It might be helpful to think about something else for a little bit. Or at least make one of those “what blank are you?” randomized instagram filters. Those are always fun.
RIP Bing Bong
We had to say goodbye to a meme this week. Bing Bong officially died. The Jonas Brothers did a version of it at the White House with Joe Byron himself. This meme had been at death’s door for a while now. We can say for sure that TikTok song mashups signal the beginning of the end of any meme. The “why am I laughing” crowd has an iron grip on those and they haven’t been funny since mid October. I’m sad to see Bing Bong go because it was once really funny. But once the president, or an equally corny celebrity gets to a meme it's over. The sadness inherent in the death of a meme is not that it’s over but that we would have been sadder to lose it earlier. By the time a meme dies, early adopters are more than tired of it and want it gone. Most meme deaths are met with “Good Riddance”. This one is no different.
If There’s Another Lockdown
I guess this one is a meme? I don’t know. I’m really grasping at straws here. Everyone this week was thinking about the possibility of another lockdown, which… we’ll see if that happens. Everyone was speculating about their behaviors during a second lockdown after how they acted during the first. My issue with this is that all of you need to think bigger. My project for the second lockdown is I’m going to read Infinite Jest, I’m going to learn German, and I’m going to effectively gaslight my friends into getting into hobbies that will benefit me. If there is some kind of second lockdown, we all need to think long term. Things that will occupy our time more wholly than the hobbies we picked up during the last one. We already know what we don’t like so we don’t need to spend a week thinking our solution for powering through is “puzzles”.
Bad Two Sentence Horror
There was one thing providing some respite from the endless Twitter pity party and it was the bad two sentence horror bot. It's just what we need. It is stupid, it is absurd, and it is not rooted in reality. Pure inept fantasy. Reddit is mostly a cesspool but when people filter out the bad and boring stuff and bring it to Twitter, I enjoy it. This is not a popular take for the reddit people but they are not a group I hold in high esteem, so I don’t care what they think. Bad two sentence horror is the MVP for contributing something fun and funny to the internet this week.
Unvalued, Unwelcome, Unsafe
All the white gays with six packs are making fun of a white queer with a six pack. This person’s existence on social media is akin to that of a less clever and interesting Trisha Paytas. I don’t have a dog in this fight but it’s necessary to shout down your own when they’re being annoying so…. go for it.
Tiktok
Further proof that there was nothing happening worth participating in. This was the best thing TikTok had to offer this week. Elmo, from Sesame Street, really killing his delivery of Paper towel roll. That’s it. Nothing more. No dance, no secret meaning. Just Elmo doing his best. You do have to hand it to Elmo though. The way he says paper towel roll is really fun.
Gator Needs His Gat, You Punk Ass Bitch
Great. Honestly I’m not seeing enough of this on my FYP. A lot of stupid song parodies about vaccines but not enough of this. Nothing like a good joke about needing your inhaler or sunscreen or equally nerdy accoutrement before you engage in your daily activities. Also I love The Other Guys. It was Adam McKay’s last great work and he probably will never top it unless he apologizes to Will Ferrell for his various crimes.
Fine. Sure. Whatever. Even the funny ones aren’t that funny. I guess we have to do this since Instagram is Facebook now.
Ok this is giving me hope for the future. Finally a funny meme. It’s in its infancy and building momentum. We’re moving on, moving forward, and making memes. It’s not our best but it's something. That’s all we really need at the end of the day. The way out of every fallow period is not with a great meme, but a mediocre one. We cannot learn to be funny right off the bat. We have to climb our way back to the top. I’ve never seen a pre Christmas period this low before but maybe that means our post Christmas period will be plentiful. I doubt it though.
The perfect bitter pill for the darkest days of the year. May next week be filled with light and better memes.