The Meme-ing of Life

So, I’m not the kind of person who tries to stay ahead of the curve, trend-wise. I usually wait for trends to wear themselves out before hopping on the band-wagon. I learned my lesson with MySpace, after all. Everyone told me I had to get one. I was so behind without one. So I got one. And guess what? A year later it was all over.

That said, it should come as no surprise that I didn’t really start looking at blogs until about a year ago, and I had no idea what a “meme” was until a couple of months ago when some friends starting meme-ing (I can only hope someone else has already verbed the term “meme” so I’m not ahead of the curve on this!).

Memes are one of those things that, done right, looks brilliant, and done poorly, seems like someone just had too much time on her hands. The simplest way to explain a meme is that it is a picture with a funny caption. The best ones embody a certain amount of situational irony. The simplest ones involve the same image in each picture and the captions all fall under the same theme. For example, some of these include Courage Wolf, Socially Awkward Penguin and Philosoraptor.

From prolonged observation of mistakes in spelling and punctuation, it would seem that most of these are made by a variety of anonymous contributors.

Wow--Scumbag Steve doesn't know how to
 spell or punctuate either. "Replies" please.

Figure it out people! It’s not that hard, really.

I think Business Cat mean he "Realized" he was a cat.

The slightly more complicated meme takes a different picture each time and attaches a funny caption to it. The simplest of these is probably the “lolcatz” meme, which takes funny pictures of cats and makes them funnier by adding silly captions, usually misspelled.

A spin-off of this kind of meme is the “Game of Lols,” which riffs on the fantasy books/series “Game of Thrones.” This takes more specialized knowledge to understand. Those of us who have plowed through 6,000 pages of George R.R. Martin’s prose can be happy to know our work has paid off.

…And then there’s the “academic” meme. Take a series of pictures on a single subject and give it a jargon-y caption, thus providing humor for a narrow yet appreciative audience. The academic meme I first came across was Feminist Ryan Gosling, which takes pictures of Ryan looking hunky and captions them with texts about feminism, using the “Hey girl” greeting that a friend of mine uses in her “Hey Girl, It’s Nic Cage” tumblr.

     

Yet another friend of mine has taken the academic motif meme and appended it to the main character of the show Friday Night Lights. Academic Coach Taylor is a motivational figure specially geared towards all us wannabe academics sweating it out over our dissertations. He’s not above some meta-commenting on the world of memes too (a popular topic for memes, of course).

While I enjoy a good meme, what frustrates me is that I can’t think of a single meme I could be the proud owner of! I simply have no creativity in that line of thinking. I mean, what would my meme be about? The eighteenth-century? That seems very niche. Being an English major? That’s already got to be out there, probably executed better than I could ever do. Jane Austen? Again, very niche and probably already exists.

So then I start trying to think of the craziest combinations possible. “Lesbian Jean-Luc Picard”! “Academic Carrie Bradshaw”! “Feminist Darth Vader”!

As you can probably sense, none of these is worth pursuing—for obvious reasons.

Business Cat -- duh.

The problem is that to be good, a meme has to be culturally relevant, themed, and wittily ironic. When I think of something good, I’ll let you know. For now, I’ll just post the rest of the examples I downloaded. (Just a coincidence they are all about cats....) Happy memeing! 

Hipster Kitty -- obvi!