Meme Report 4/17
Does He Make You Laugh? He Doesn't Make Me Cry.
Tiger Woods Tree
It’s 2008 somewhere! Tiger Woods's enduring presence in our culture is proof that things used to be different and if you committed an infraction before the advent of “cancel culture”, it doesn’t count. This image is not particularly striking or funny but an invitation to bring Tiger Woods back to the main stage. We loved Tiger and yearn to have him back in the public consciousness as he once was. The amazing sport of Golf just isn’t the same without him.
New Wojack
If you don’t know what a Wojack is, keep scrolling. Don’t worry about it. It’s a kind of hieroglyphics I wish I didn’t understand. I’m not providing context and I’m not explaining it to the uninitiated. Go live your one wild and precious life. Everyone else, here we go.
Wojacks are insidiously evil and we’ve laundered them into being acceptable in everyday internet discussion. We let normies use the blonde girl Wojack even though the rest of us all know she, and the rest of her friends, only exist because of the Trads. The line that divides real online from fake online is a true semiotic understanding of Wojacks. Though they all represent flimsy ideas of types of people, this recent addition is by far the flimsiest. It lacks the ideologies of the others. It’s a Bluecheck (new definition) meme. It’s made by people who got rich claiming to understand the internet but could not go to the mat with any basement dweller or tumblrina. The people who think that paying for Twitter to increase engagement is worth it will not make any valuable contributions to meme culture.
What Kind Of [x] Are You
There’s something so captivating about Jesse Plemons—America’s Sweetheart’s Sweetheart. For lifelong fans of Kirsten Dunst, we see him and think it’s good they ended up together. We’re happy every time they’re in a movie at all and especially happy when they’re in a movie together. The scene from Civil War has meme potential only because Jesse Plemons is so talented and he’s only in the movie because Kirsten called him in at the last minute. The meme itself comes from the dopamine hit we all got when we saw our favorite power couple on screen together.
She was [x] Bullying A [x] Year Old
People love to say this as if age matters once you enter the workforce. If you can be work besties with a 53-year-old, you can be work enemies with one too. This applies across industries.
TikTok
Does He Make You Laugh
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Ocean’s 11 is my favorite movie. Ever. When this came across my For You page, I was not surprised. It’s an incredible exchange in the film and it can be easily taken out of context by girls who only seem to post about their terrible relationships. A question I’ve been wrestling with for a while, especially in terms of TikTok is Does Context Matter? Obviously, we want to say yes because who are we without context? How does society function without context? On TikTok, they will tell you, very easily. In the context of the film, “He doesn’t make me cry.” is a compromise Julia Roberts’ character Tess is making. Anthony Garcia’s Terry Benedict is not a good man or a good husband, but he’s not Danny Ocean, and he’s not going to jail for robbing casinos. On TikTok, the trend is not this complex. These girls aren’t making these decisions. They most likely just found a better boyfriend. They don’t play the hardship of Tess’s choice in their lip sync. They just celebrate the fact that their current man doesn’t make them cry. In the span of this short clip, context doesn’t have to matter.
In TikTok’s effort to catalog every element of the human experience, we’ve finally gotten to Divas, 12 and under. It’s long been documented that there’s a self-esteem crisis in young women that starts around puberty. However, no one has documented that before puberty, there’s a whole cohort of girls who have no trouble believing in themselves and find this oncoming loss of confidence almost unbelievable. Finally, we have a trend where these girls are speaking out about who they used to be. Last year's reflection on Girlhood failed to mention that for some of us, it wasn’t all about playing and sisterhood. It was about putting on a show, and we were the stars.
Prom
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
TikTok occasionally needs to reset the ecosystem and remind us all that the app functions best when it’s used for goofing off. Teenagers posting fun transition videos about their prom are using the app to its fullest extent. These videos are a reminder of how we should all be posting. If you do not have the same purity of heart as these kids posting about their prom, maybe you shouldn’t be posting on TikTok at all.
Mike Wazowski
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Nothing makes me laugh harder than girls from the Northeast asking their heavily accented fathers if they know Mike Wazowski and his friend Sully. They always say yes and have absolutely no idea the girls are talking about the characters from Monsters Inc.