New Year, Same Memeforum. I apologize for abandoning you all during Christmas but I decided the week between Christmas and New Year’s counts as a federal holiday, or it should. In the New Year, I am back and better than ever. Let's get into it.
~Memeforum Under the Mistletoe~
We’ll start with the Christmas Stuff and Get it out of the way. I love Christmas Twitter. It feels like one giant group chat where people send dispatches from their family dinners. It is where we go to trade notes on all we are enduring together. If Thanksgiving is TikTok’s Holiday, because of the wealth of large upper-middle-class families showing off their kitchens and mild dramas, Christmas is Twitter's Holiday. Whether they be mutuals or oomfs or strangers we’re all there together summarizing our time spent with extended family in brief clips. We don’t need the visuals TikTok provides. We’re all writing 240-character telegrams with stock characters outlining our evening. Each one is unique in its way, but familiar enough that we do not need more than what we are given. TikTok is good because every video is essentially the same. Twitter is good because every tweet is its own rich text revealing more about a family dynamic than any video could ever hope to capture. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Visited By 3 Ghosts
This meme is tired and stupid for a lot of reasons. People just want excuses to post pictures of 3 divas they love, which is… forgivable but is not a meme nor a joke. It’s just a photo of boygenius. Something we’re not exactly in short supply of. There were other versions of this prompt with nothing much differentiating them last week and I hate them all the same amount except I hate this one the most. In the Charles Dickens classic, a Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by FOUR ghosts. Every idiot who wants to participate is forgetting Marley’s ghost! Remember Marley? Scrooge's business partner? He wears the chains he forged in life? He’s the one who tells Scrooge about the other ghosts. Everybody claims to love the muppet’s Christmas Carol so much but when was the last time any of you watched it while looking up from your phone. Low effort and stupid, but worse of all, textually inaccurate.
Whoville Musical Instrument
Now this? This is a good Christmas meme. Christmas is a breeding ground for memetic content. The media landscape is largely unchanged with a few attempted entries every year. The classics must hold up to the scrutiny and be either so light in content that they can bear endless repetition or so dense that they can be endlessly examined. Anything even slightly middling cannot be brought into the fold of our traditions. So in December, we return to the old texts, mostly a Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 20-minute specials that are so full from frame to frame we find new ways to talk about them every year. This year 35-year-olds who spent too much time reading Pitchfork cracked their knuckles and gave us hot takes on the Whoville Musicians. I love anything that takes a completely serious tone while spouting off nonsense. I could read a whole book, or maybe an article, or maybe watch a sketch about the history of Whoville’s music scene. It brought something new to the holiday landscape.
🎄🎄🎄
Paul Mescal Running Rumors
I feel White Boy of the Month is an inept title for our current crop of handsome young men. They’ve all been around for a while, and each one has their supporters but they all enjoy a collective appreciation from several WBOTM voting blocs. Paul Mescal is Ireland’s representative for the WBOTM and a few weeks ago he gained a new notch in his belt that helps to cement his status as a perpetual WBOTM. We learned from a TikTok that Mr. Ireland allegedly takes girls on walks the day after he hooks up with them, and then runs away from them. Just books it down the road, abandoning them on the streets of North London. It doesn’t help that he is running in almost every candid photo. The memes made themselves.
For those wondering how this impacts his standings in the rankings, I’m not sure. I do know that while this falls in the category of being shitty to girls, it’s not a cancelable offense, and if anything makes him seem more attainable. It’s like the Timmy (Mr. French New York) chlamydia rumor. All people hear when they hear those rumors is that those guys hook up with a lot of people, which means any random girl in the right location might have a chance. Paul Mescal is perhaps more beloved now that we have reason to deny him and choose not to.
Welcome Back [x]
The popular adoption of the anti-joke has the power to make memes even better than we ever thought they could be. It also gives license to incredibly lazy people to participate and believe that their jokes are better and more worthy because they are incapable of following the rules. The first few people to bend the rules to make this format work for them were funny. But I think I’d rather see people try to make it work by any means necessary than watch people just say anything. We understand that you think Joanna Newsom is Proust reborn but there’s a 50-year gap there. Try a little harder. Perhaps 2024 should be the year of trying really hard no matter the results rather than just tossing something off for the sake of participating. I don’t think it's funny if the people in the reincarnation post are born 50 years apart, especially if it's the 10th time I've seen it that day. The liars, the people who overlap in their lives, and the people who actually died in the same year are much more fascinating creative exercises. Anyone can be Julias Caesar reincarnated. Play within the limits of the form, and you might discover Towns Van Zandt died a month before you were born.
Tiger Woods Big Dog
We can still do great things with very limited means. Tiger Woods Big Dog is proof we still want more than anything, to have fun on the computer. Our creativity is limitless, we just need an image and a dream. With a little prompting, we can still be funny.
Moneyball Lord of the Rings
This is the kind of content we can only get between Christmas and New Year’s. People who have been on the couch for days on end, watching their favorite movies and letting their minds wander. It seems only natural that the nerds of film Twitter would combine two of their favorite films, The Lord of the Rings, and Moneyball. They live to compare and contrast over there but not only compare and contrast, they love to combine. They live to synthesize and I love to see it. It’s fun to see people whose brains all work the same perfectly overlay one film with another. They seem to have memorized the scripts for each and can easily match one film to another, playing, dare I say, at the top of their game.
Lemon Pig
I hate the lemon pig!!!! I hate him!! I’m all for new traditions and crafts but there’s something about the lemon pig that I hate. It is peak millennial cringe in a way that gets under my skin. People throw that phrase around a lot without being able to define exactly what they mean but I know exactly why I hate this. It’s an inorganic love posing as sincerity. A few years ago, someone found a recipe for a lemon pig in an old cookbook and everyone on Twitter jumped on the opportunity to be weird about something.
Everyone who makes a lemon pig does so because they either saw the original post or saw a post inspired by the original post. It is not spreading among the offline and appeals to a kind of online millennial. They do it because it's weird and it doesn’t make any sense and it’s slightly off-putting. It’s quirky in every detestable sense of the word. There is no genuine love of the past or genuine weirdness here. You know it’s weird and that’s why you make it. I think there’s a difference that’s important to note. To take to something because you have a genuine desire to recreate it and love it and to take to something because it fits with your personal brand of adopted weirdness. The lemon pig seems to only exist in the latter. No one saw the lemon pig and loved it unironically. Look me in my eyes and tell me that you would have made a lemon pig out of genuine love for the creature and not a desire to be seen as interesting. The gulf that exists between me and these people is that when I love something ironically I know I’m being mean.
Barack Obama Movie List
Ever since he wrote that memoir in 2020 and new Obama lore dropped every morning, I have grown to love the Barack Obama Movie list. The more corporate and focus grouped it gets, the more interesting it becomes to me. The “Cool President Movie List” is a fragment of a bygone era struggling to keep up. The song list is fine and formulaic. It’s cool dad music and there's not much else to say. However, his movie list of things he produced and predictable Oscar picks leaves room for a few wildcard spots and glaring omissions. This year I am stunned that Polite Society, an underappreciated movie I really liked made it but Barbie did not. I would love to read all the emails about that decision. Thank God this list came out at the end of the year so we didn’t have to have 3 days of discourse about why Obama didn’t like Barbie. We were spared from the worst takes imaginable but also think of what could have been.
TikTok
It’s still boring on TikTok. We were sorely lacking in year-end wrap-ups this year. I didn’t see any Months of the Year sounds that had been so popular in years past. They’re not high art but they’re not bad! We need something to keep the lights on. Some load-bearing walls! Speaking of general lifestyle content there’s also a lot less than there was a few months ago. It seems like nobody wants to romanticize their life anymore. What happened to all the mid-level influencer girlies who were throwing dinner parties this summer and taking pictures? You can’t make the vast barren landscapes and cold bodies of water poetic? Are you stupid?
I Want Something That I Want
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We have not had a trend like this on TikTok in a good long while. It’s been so long since everyone was encouraged to be funny in a trend that didn’t involve photos or joke writing. In theory, physical comedy should shine on TikTok. It should be a place where the punchline of a joke depends on the way the subject moves on screen. There should be many a trend where each person brings their own physicality to a sound or repeated action and the joke is the way they play it. This one is special in that it seems to be a reminder that we can have fun like this. The trend itself does not stand out to me but hopefully, it paves the way for more, considering the bar for entry requires no writing or thinking. It is deceptively difficult to do physical comedy, so I’d like to see everyone try.
Are We Soulmates In Every Universe
TikTok has long been said to be Tumblr 2.0 but it has now reached its final form. The discourse era is over and we are fully in fandom land. If you don’t engage with fandom culture of any kind the app is incredibly boring. The middle class of the app who posts jokes and engages unseriously with their followers has been chased out so the only people having any fun are the ones making edits about shows I don’t watch but come to be familiar with because of the endless posting. I’m currently learning a lot about the Percy Jackson Disney Plus show because it feels like the only content that has any kind of fun creativity behind it. Everything else is severely lacking.
Alex Consani Lifestyle
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We enter 2024 with a newly anointed It-girl. Alex Consani meets all the criteria of the Wendy Williams checklist. She’s an Icon, she’s a legend, and she is the moment. Now, come on now! In many ways, she’s on her way to becoming a real supermodel, in a way we haven’t had in several years. That being said, the most recent TikTok of hers that's circulating is not her best work. I don’t love it and I don’t get why everyone else really keyed into this one. When we decide someone on the internet is funny we have to applaud every video they make as better than the last until we decide they’re not funny at all and never were. That’s an unsustainable way to view comedy and art, so I’m a proponent of curating your favorites. I’m not casting her aside because one video doesn’t match my vibe, I’m just eagerly awaiting the next one. If you love someone funny, you know not every bit is a winner and sometimes the crowd pleasers aren’t your favorite. I’ll forever love pencil skirt or suicide. That’s the realest thing anyone has ever said. That to me, is high art, but underappreciated in its time.
One of my favorites you’ve ever done!