Meme Report 9/29
I Rolled My Car Five Times On The Way Home
I am still collecting survey answers and will be for a little while longer so please fill it out at your earliest convenience. I want to hear from you about how to make Memeforum better! Now onto the memes!
🚨TRANSCENDENCE ALERT🚨
Many memes make a migration from Twitter to Tiktok and vice versa but rarely does a meme live on these platform simultaneously, playing to the strengths of both at the same time. This week we have one of those.
This meme inspires something in everyone. It will be performed as a monologue for theater school auditions for years. The meme is enriched by knowledge of Erika Jayne, the speaker, and her ongoing legal battle and divorce but I think it’s not fully necessary. The story is long and rambling and doesn’t make any sense. The one breath she recites it with makes it all the more ridiculous. The thing I like the most about this meme is the confluence of Real Housewives and Copypasta, both of which seem limited to their bubbles of the Internet and difficult to break out of. Of course there’s overlap between the two of them (Gay People that use Reddit), but it feels good that organically people took to this. Good long Copypasta doesn’t come along that often, especially on Twitter. It’s nice that we’re updating our references and adding to the canon. With all the boyfriends that were forced to watch various Real Housewives franchises over quarantine, I feel this will get a lot play outside of the regular circles. The Tiktok sound is also bound to spread the meme to those unaware of the connection to the Real Housewives. Funny is funny and no one on Tiktok does any research as to where sounds come from. It’s great both on it’s own and for what it brings to the table. The meme ecosystem needs to grow and change with society and a Real Housewives Copypasta is exactly the new life it needs.
Ben Platt Crying
Dear Evan Hansen is one of the worst things to happen to musical theater in recent years. Things are bad for musical theater in general right now and we’re all still recovering from Hamilton as a society but Dear Evan Hansen was bad for insiders (People who watch the Tony Awards). For those not in the know, the more beloved underdog from that year’s Tonys was Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was unfairly sidelined in favor of Dear Evan Hansen and ended its run shortly after. Dear Evan Hansen was taken to but the absurdly earnest and people who believe whatever won the Tony was really the best musical that year. It’s growing popularity led to a movie and we have never stopped hearing the end of it. Every decision since the project was greenlit has been mistake after mistake. This photo of 28 year old Ben Platt crying is the most recent installment of unending evidence that movie musicals might be a mistake. For me, I have no personal attachment to the meme but it is useful to me. It is a means to an end. The end being we never have to deal with this musical again. I’ll allow it to add fuel to the fire. End this madness. Fuck Pasek AND Paul. (Dogfight is still good though)
Look at that old man go! He’s still got it! Dancing around! Everyone seemed to be having fun with this one. It taps on the universal love of old people dancing. A deep seated evolutionary impulse to discover joy when old people have moves. It dates all the way back to the early 2000s when Six Flags released the Old Man Dancing commercials. Like cat videos and soldiers coming home to their dogs, this is what kills on the Internet every time. No use fighting it.
Tiktok
My first problem with this trend is that these videos are so long. My second problem is literally everything else. Anything that encourages more boring white people to say slay all the time is bad. I don’t care what items on the cheesecake factory menu are slays or not. There’s not enough varieties in both the types of slays and what things people are putting in each category. So many things people are categorizing don’t make sense. I’m not willing to live in a world where butternut squash soup is a minute slay. The celebrity red carpet looks are the only ones worth watching because they understand and respect when people really go for it, even when they misstep. They seem to be the only ones that can correctly identify a partial slay. My final gripe with this trend is the last phrase. “Slayed if the VMAs were a funeral” is the most descriptive and genuinely funny phrase I’ve heard in a long time and every unfunny HR manager doing this trend is really missing the mark when trying to find something that slays if the VMAs were a funeral. I would not say an Iced Chai from Starbucks fits the description of “slayed if the VMAs were a funeral”. The best way to judge if one of these videos is good or whether one should make one is simple. Does the last item you are talking about meet the description “Slayed if the VMAs were a funeral”? If the answer is no, consider the video bad and don’t make it.
Happy for a Borat revival that’s not Very Nice or My Wife, though I do love those. Are these videos particularly inventive and does each one bring something new to the format? No. But it does include my two of my favorite genres, pets that begrudgingly live together and countries with playful rivalries. I love to see what the clock radio for each pair will be. Sometimes it’s still being in the European Union or having all four legs when your cat sibling does not. Adds a little spice to the format. I would love if we could add more rivalries besides those two which are the only ones I’m seeing. The more niche the better. It’s always good to have something inoffensive and endlessly watchable on tiktok. Something entertaining that we can all agree is good. Something to watch besides the Berries and Cream situation which has become untenable.
Gorgeous Gorgeous Girls Love Soup
It’s fall y’all, so I understand that I will have to take up my sword for the anti soup crusade almost daily. I want to say right now I will never be pro soup memes in general. This one is very basic and the addition into the “Hot Girl” activities pantheon makes it unbearable. I thought the Hot Girl era was over. It went the way of girlboss, in that it proves you’re behind the times if you’re genuinely still saying things like “Hot girl walk” and “Hot girls eat soup” unironically. It’s not very lindy and quite cheugy. Enjoy your Hot Girl soup while it lasts because by November, it will be passé to utter the phrase “Hot girl soup” even disparagingly.
People are confused by this one. The purpose of the meme is saying things that we all know but shocked us when we were little. Learning your grandparents know each other, learning the teachers don’t live at school, things of that ilk. Using this sound to reenact learning actual shocking information is a dangerous path to go down. Are You Shitting My Dick would become yet another sound where people trauma dump and talk about their medical woes which we can’t let happen. Are You Shitting My Dick is so funny and wonderful and I love it. Don’t ruin it with your uninteresting personal lives.
This sound is not on my For You page in the way the 150k videos under the sound would have you believe. So that means it is deeply on straight Tiktok. I have to hand it to them, though. Half hearted acting performance is a fun concept and they are executing it well. Finally an actually funny trend from these people. I had worse things to say about it when I thought it was alt Tiktok but straight Tiktok being a little funny is an accomplishment worth celebrating.
Would love one day to have a deep dive into what you consider the meme canon