It seems like only yesterday I encountered my first meme. If I’m not mistaken, I was in the sixth grade, and I stumbled across a website where people posted photos of cats marked with silly captions typed in a bold print font. Something about the unsophisticated humor surrounding them, the way the captions were often nonsensical or unoriginal, was tragic and gorgeous and nearly Shakespearean. I became entranced in an internet romance, something strange and passionate — I loved memes.
As I have grown and as the internet has grown with me, the development of memes has skyrocketed, and with that, my interest in them has begun to plummet. I love irony. Dramatic irony, Seinfeldian irony, and even the occasional verbal irony all give me a satisfied laugh. But memes have developed a new, highly ironic anti-humor, and while sarcasm has always been a popular means of comedy, the modern day meme has amalgamated into the least funny branch of comedy ever. Small printed words inserted into awkward photos, people making cringe-worthy statements in the middle of a news interview, "Spongebob Squarepants" images blurred and italicized — these things should not be funny. Admittedly, I too am at fault for finding these things funny, though it’s not something I am proud of by any means. Memes are often in poor taste, displaying humor at the expense of those with decent intentions, and often utilized by people on the internet to make jokes in poor taste.
The idea that memes have made their way into real-world culture is absolutely appalling. Morning weathercasters implore their audiences to “ cash [them] outside,” and commercials feature nonsense humor about Chuck Norris and Pepe the Frog. These are unfortunate circumstances! Once upon a time humor had one facet, funny, and in order to be funny, you had to be at least somewhat creative. Memes have literally ruined comedic creativity, and new material is hardly of concern to TV and media personnel, who can now take from some silly photo on the internet and make with it something simple, stupid, and entertaining. Teenagers especially live for these jokes, for these posts, for this pseudo-comedy-culture.
It’s not underground, or undiscovered, memes aren’t cool. And that’s the point- they’re not cool. Being not cool is, ironically, cool right now. It doesn’t take a nice jacket to make a cool outfit, it instead takes a collection of TGI Friday’s enamel pins and a hat that has the word “drank” written on it in a 12 pt serif font. It is no longer cool to have read a book, gone to a sports game, or watch a show; instead, it’s cool if you can recite memorably ridiculous lines from a late '90s pop song or know how to use Reddit. This is the unfortunate turn our humor is turning towards, and all stemming from silly photos of cats dressed as tacos.
My boyfriend and I know a boy who is downright obsessed with memes, and “meme culture” — if I dare call it that — and it’s often hard to have a full conversation with him while avoiding awkward, ironic references to a trendy internet subject. We were sitting at lunch, having recently run into him at a restaurant, and my boyfriend looks at me in all sincerity and says, “Could you imagine what he would have been if he was 18 like 10 years ago?” And while my initial answer was “a serial killer,” as with the amount of time that boy must have spent nuzzled into a computer screen he must have some form of obsessive compulsion, but then after some thought, I decided, well, he’d probably just be stupid, as would his jokes.
