I am not infallible. I am but a human woman. I have a life and a job (sometimes). I go on vacation. I do not spend every day glued to my computer. I miss some memes. On the other hand, I am very careful with my criteria for when and how a meme makes it into the Meme Report. Some things don’t meet the criteria in a given week but kick around for a while in the ether. They never reach a zenith but never totally disappear. Others exists on TikTok and Twitter and Tumblr every week and I’m waiting for them to have a major moment on a single app. I’m tracking and paying attention. Some don’t make the cut. Some slip through the cracks and have nowhere to go. Until Now. Here is the Mid Year Check-In of 🌟Memes I Missed 🌟.
I would like to give a special shout out to DaBigBoyClub. One of my loyal readers who answered my call for memes I missed. I included most of their suggestions here. Thank you for your contribution and thank you for being an engaged reader.
All Around The Internet
Homophobic Dog
People LOVE the homophobic dog. The meme is essentially a small white dog edited to say various slightly homophobic things. There’s an elegance to the hatefulness. Like an older southern women who doesn’t want to be rude, just prejudiced. The meme is also created and mostly enjoyed by gay people so it’s fine. I love the homophobic dog for weird-meme reasons. I love that it’s both simple and incomprehensible. Why is the dog homophobic? Because it’s funny. Next Question. Why this dog? Why not this dog? Some gay twenty something on the internet decided on this dog. That’s why this dog.
The part I hate is the ending. The heart warming part. The human interest story part. Somebody found the dog's owner and told them about the meme. They were shocked at first and then they embraced it. They went so far as to make merch. The dog’s owner are gay so they think it’s funny. We should have anticipated the dog’s owners being gay. We found the dog on Instagram. Once we found her, we learned her given name was Whitney Chewston. Of course, the dog has gay owners.
I don’t really care about these people, mostly because now the meme changes. Now the meme and the real thing are linked. The real thing is now aware of the meme, which breaks down the barrier between subject (Whitney Chewston) and object (Homophobic Dog). The real thing cannibalizes the meme and it’s hard to tell one from the other. Now the real thing is both meme and subject of the meme. The homophobic dog in the meme is Whitney Chewston, but the character of the homophobic dog meme is not Whitney Chewston. But sometimes it is. See? all of that was gibberish. This is the very reason the heyday of any meme is before object meets subject. Homophobic dog had her moment and now that there’s merch the moments over.
No Bitches?
It’s nice to have a ridiculous sigil as a way to insult someone. Instead of saying that someone is a basement dwelling loser virgin, we’ve gone with an edited image of Megamind that says No Bitches? It’s quicker, it’s easier and it makes a more nuanced point. We could be wrong about our opponent being a basement dweller, loser, or virgin and we would lose the high ground in whatever very important online argument has gotten to this level. All of those things could be wrong but No Bitches? could still hit them where it hurts. No Bitches? is the present tense. Anyone can lose their virginity but it takes a real man to get bitches consistently. At least in the gladiator ring that exists for men on the internet. I’ve personally never used a No Bitches? but it’s a useful tool to have when one is fighting incels on the internet.
Get Your Ass Up and Work
Every year Kim Kardashian and her family contribute a couple things to culture that might make all of their nonsense worth it, simply from a celebrity standpoint . They prove they have some real superstar qualities that earn them a place among the movie and pop stars of the world, you know real celebrities. They do or say something that reminds us the soft spot a lot of us have for them, is maybe a little bit earned. “Get Your Ass Up and Work” was this year's best contribution, so far. It has remained in culture for months, and has yet to hit its zenith. It’s mostly a real life meme. I say it mostly when I’m around my friends. Work can be replaced by any activity one is rallying those around them to do. It’s also popular on podcasts, the place on the internet where natural conversational memes rules. At any moment someone might chime in “Get your fucking ass up and work! Nobody wants to work anymore!” to mild chuckles.
She Let Me Hit Cause I’m Goofy
This meme is men realizing after all these years that what women want is skinny skater boys who spend too much time on reddit but can also hold a conversation. To be fair this is a somewhat unrealistic standard. Not every boy can be the Planet Money TikTok guy, though they may try! This meme is detached ironic body positivity for men. Their version of an “I am beautiful” infographic from an influencer is a guy with the username “DaAlQaedaDefender” reminding his disciples that all they need is a sense of humor. It’s probably more effective too. No need to spend hours counting calories in the gym brothers, she let me hit cause i’m goofy.
Should We Call Bella Hadid?
This meme is about the modern interpretation of wellness for women. We’re all trying to get and stay healthy both in our bodies and in our mindsets about our bodies. We have very little tolerance for people who aren’t on that journey. We’re trying to beat the eating disorders out of each other the same way they were beaten into us: Shame. A pretty girl telling us it’s not cool to brag about not having eaten all day might fix us. Her telling us it’s actually embarrassing and annoying will hopefully undo the damage from some different pretty girl all those years ago. The first time we were told it’s not cool to eat. The older we get the more it’s true what our middle school guidance counselors told us. That the coolest thing is actually being yourself and having confidence. If not, who are we trying to impress? Bella Hadid?
E Bugs
I still have a soft spot for indecipherable brand tweets. The Looney Toons twitter responded to the Lady Gaga’s House of Gucci promotional photo with an identical photo but Bugs Bunny was also there and the added text of “e Bugs” and everyone had a good laugh. It was a weird move on their part and it made me genuinely laugh. It opens the door to add Bugs Bunny to other places as well. Specifically anywhere Lady Gaga is. “E bugs” is an incredible addition to the lexicon. Hopefully for years to come we can add Bugs into various scenes and tableaus. It doesn’t have to make sense and it doesn’t have be appropriate. The first one certainly didn’t and wasn’t.
Jorts
Someone wrote a funny reddit post and now we all live the consequences (a self righteous twitter account written from the perspective of a cat). There is a desire to have good things stay with us forever. We no longer understand a moment anymore. Jorts can not simply live in a reddit post. Now Jorts has his own Twitter account and is a labor organizer. Cool. Awesome. No one has to move on. No one has to let go. No one has to grow up. Jorts lives forever on the internet. Who cares if it’s a different cat in 10 years? They’ll replace Jorts with a new one. Just because something was funny once does not mean it will be funny forever. Or that it deserves its own twitter account that tweets multiple times a day about various labor strikes in the United States.
Hot Ones
I love Hot Ones. I love the never ending parade of celebrity interview shows that have brought us here. It’s not enough to talk anymore. We need the celebrities to eat increasingly hotter wings. The host is not a charismatic celebrity but the mastermind of the steady hand, Sean Evans. His skill is his poker face and refusal let celebrity or friendliness overwhelm him. It’s fun to imagine literally anyone on Hot Ones. What I love about this meme, more so than others memes on the list, is that we’re dolling it out sparingly. Only when it’s relevant, or been a while, does someone make a new edit of some famous character or historical figure on Hot Ones. It is a minimum of two weeks between memes. I hope it never reaches a zenith and we continue to have one every once in a while for the rest of time. I don’t want us to burn out.
TikTok
What Are You Listening To?
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
There are people on the internet who contribute nothing but a feeling of niceness. They talk about “community” and “connection” with nothing larger to say. They just want us all to recognize that we’re all human and then once we do, their work here is done. That’s the “what are you listening to guy”. It’s Humans of New York 2.0. The initial response to these people is wanting to be featured. We all want to show off our music taste. Then we want to get one over on him. We want to answer their simple earnestness with various kinds of irony. Because the earnestness is so simple, the irony can come in many different forms. It has become so commonplace in our understanding of the internet that several sketches about unrelated topics will end with a “what are you listening to?” button. It’s cute and it’s funny and I don’t hate the original concept as much as I hate other versions of earnestness. The ironic copies can be better than the originals, but not always. Neither Irony nor earnestness are the ultimate winner here. There is an ever shifting balance of the two.
Don’t Pee On The Floor, Use The Commodore
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Ok I’ll say it. Some memes bewilder even me. This combination of words and pictures makes no sense to me and yet several thousand people have laughed at it and understood it enough to make other versions. Good for them. Keep going I guess.
Thneed girl
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
“This thing is a Thneed. A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need! It’s a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat. But it has other uses. Yes, far beyond that. You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets! Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats! The Lorax said, Sir! You are crazy with greed. There is no one on earth who would buy that fool Thneed!”
—Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
I view thneed girl as a colleague. She is a cultural critic of the modern age like no other. Those who do not know their internet history are doomed to repeat it. She is a teacher. While everyone else is trying to disrupt and innovate, she is reminding us that we’ve been here before. As someone who lived through the Onceler era on tumblr, she is intimately familiar with the thneed as a consequence. Every time she appears, the baseline of the Onceler’s song plays and those who remember are rocketed back. She never lets us forget that we’ve seen it all before. We’ve been sold an item that can be anything and everything since before we could read. Through the long complicated life of the internet, here she is to remind us of that.
With any creator whose job is to point out what we’re not seeing, there’s also the game of it. Seeing an item of clothing being marketed as skirt and dress and hat and looking for the tell tale signs of a stitch. Waiting for our friend to appear. If not, the hope to be the first to send it to her or tag her in the video. We are seeing as she sees and we want to tell her. We are hoping to play a part in the thneed girl’s rise and power. Every part of it is fun. We need more good samaritans to say we’ve seen this before and we cannot be fooled.
Tell Me [X] Without Telling Me [X]
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
This phrase has been around for a long time on TikTok. It is part of the TikTok parlance that I have a love hate relationship with. It falls into the category of things I hate (“unalive” and “no hate to this creator”) rather than things I find funny (sewerslide and le$bean, when pronounced by text to speech Le Dollar Bean). On its face it’s a cool concept. It’s like reverse engineering a Sherlock Holmes theory. What’s a trade secret only those who knew would know? Tell me how someone would figure out you worked at a the Gap in the Northern New York from 2015 to 2017. However everyone wants to play. When everyone wants to play, they’re willing to bend the rules to make it fit. When the rules are bent there is no more game. Now it’s everywhere when it doesn’t need to be. I like it as a prompt and I hate it as a response. When said as a response no one asked for, most of the time the person has said the thing they are supposed to not tell. “I’m a parent of two kids. “Tell me you're a parent without telling me you’re a parent”. If all that wasn’t enough the phrase migrated to Twitter from TikTok and that was the last straw. It’s over.
Mike Kara, Here
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Mike Kara is a symbol of a larger trend. Someone who stitches almost every video on their FYP with their own input. People come to recognize them as a character on TikTok with an almost inescapable presence. There’s a new one of these every month. Mike Kara is the one with the most stage presence. He introduces himself in every video as well, so he also has name recognition. Most of his kind (stitch commenters) are known by their physical descriptors. Part of the reason these people get attention is because they are being made fun of. The morality of this is tricky because I think most people playing along with Mike Kara would say they’re doing just that. Simply playing along. There’s affection there and they want him to keep going. But they’re also making fun of a stranger online with no real reason to be kind. Some would say they’re doing so affectionately. So many people interact with him that he now does cameo requests. So he’s earning an income. If he’s better off for it, what’s the harm? But can we live ourselves if we continue to poke fun and engage with people knowing full well we’re not doing it in good faith? Does that matter if everyone is getting paid? I don’t know. They’re not paying me to answer that question.
So many memes, so little time. Another great Sunday Edition! "Jorts" and "Don't pee on the floor" had passed me by somehow. I love memeforum!