I am not a researcher by trade. I am a cultural critic who merely perceives and observes. I see the world as it presents itself to me and use only cursory knowledge of the world at large to synthesize my thoughts. I feel that's all that I can offer as I am not an academic. I have only my lived experiences and feel my readers do as well. They are not turning to me to plunge the depths of the internet and return with more knowledge. They are turning to me to see the deeper meaning that one can only see from having seen it all before. That is why I can come with only what light searching has to tell me about the resurrected meme du jour. Mrs. Obama, It's been an honor.
First, we start with the obvious. The pieces we put together with only our eyes that makes my generation laugh so hard at this picture. We have the main Penguin of Madagascar, Skipper, for those intimately familiar. Laughing at the Penguins of Madagascar is almost a reflex at this point. They were the highlight of the first and I'll say it, second Madagascar movies. They were a smash hit and stuck around in culture well past their welcome. They had a small part in the first movie and we were happy to see them in the second. They were given their own TV series which had 149 episodes. We remember them now in culture as something that made us laugh until it didn’t. A joke that lasted so long it became funny again. To see the penguins now reminds us of a joke we laughed hard at in childhood but was ruined by corporate greed. A joke that felt sophisticated for an 8 year old that we were still expected to laugh at when we were 17.
Next we have the disintegration effect. I recognize the disintegration effect from an anti-abortion meme that was made in order to appeal to youth culture because it emulates the way the Avengers disintegrate at the end of Infinity War . What I did not realize is that this effect predates Avengers Infinity War and that the film looks like a shitty hastily edited meme, which is not good for them but really funny to me. Wherever you recognize the effect from, you recognize it. It means disintegration into the nether realm or what have you. Death by erasure of some kind. All of your particles disintegrating from our universe into the next one. We know inherently what that pixelation means.
Finally we have the text. Impact font emulating the old days. Our memes were simpler then and spelled out exactly what we meant. This text though is more obscure, Mrs Obama it’s been an honor. The font is funny. The text itself is funny and ties everything together. I don’t know where the phrase came from but in my mind it’s an elevation of Thanks Obama. The conservative meme reappropriated to refer to anything bad happening. The meme that was then redirected to Michelle when the school lunch initiative went into effect and we could no longer have bake sales or full size pop tarts. But that feels like a leap in logic that doesn’t give us the full picture.
The event this meme is referencing has never happened but we can put all the parts together and imagine a world in which it does. We understand our folklore well enough to believe this meme. Our favorite childhood penguin called to serve in some imaginary war. What Skipper had been training the other penguins for had finally happened. These were his final goodbyes. The last and most important one to his commander, the honorable Michelle Obama. It had been an honor to serve.
Every part of this meme elevates itself and lowers itself at the same time. The brain tries to comprehend how serious it is or where it came from and cannot. Too many different channels at the same time and by the time it got to my section of the internet it was completely removed from any recognizable ties. In the early days it probably made complete sense to somebody but not to me and not to anyone I know. It’s gone through too many cycles and is now threadbare in its connections.
As I said I am not a researcher. In looking for the origins of this meme I found something but from it i cannot figure out how we got here. The meme itself exists on KnowYourMeme under the “Don’t Say The N Word” meme which is not a meme or genre of video I remember or ever engaged with. Probably because the two main contributors to it were the website iFunny and PewDiePie which are quite simply not my cup of tea. The page details how the Penguins of Madagascar become major characters but nothing leads us to the end point. There are dead ends of deleted videos and videos removed for violating community guidelines. The page itself seems to end right when I’m about to understand how it all comes together. The picture for the page is a still from a video where Michelle Obama teaches the Penguins of Madagascar what Veterans are but no one in that video says the magic words so there are leaps yet to be made for our final version.
It’s all twists and turns with several dead ends and to me and my friends, it doesn’t matter. Trying to make the connections from the beginning to the end is a fool's errand, especially since all of it seems to be deleted. We don’t really have the same questions that older people have about memes like this and if we can’t find the answers, we don’t really care. It’s funnier without the baggage and as an isolated meme. It all makes sense as is and the sense it doesn’t make is why we laugh. We don’t really want it or need it explained. Where our parents ask “who is that?” and “do you know them?” and “what does that mean?” We simply laugh and send it over and over again. We understand and don’t understand at the same time, knowing that understanding doesn’t make it any more funny, only less. We love the absurdity of all these semi familiar pieces being put together in this way. All we can say in the end is, Mrs. Obama, It’s been an honor.
This is your Zodiac