I made this comment in response to someone at Chainsawsuit, and I wanted to keep it here for posterity. I think it sums up how I feel about memes, when I think too often I come across as having a scorched-earth policy for anyone who would dare to be creative in a manner I don’t find compelling. That’s incorrect but I think that’s how I sound. See if this fits better:
let me clarify a thought on memes — memes are not immediately poison. to suggest this is to say “no emoticons either, and no lowercase letters, and only correct punctuation.” ridiculous. we can’t do that.we need memes. we need these ideas to exist. we need methods of self-expression for people of every creative stripe.
my assertion is that after the first 5 or 10 iterations of a meme, the meme has to become meta to survive. then the meme is just an inside joke. inside jokes depreciate rapidly. the return on investment is pretty goddamn low. unfortunately this is where the meme really takes root and shines.
someone on twitter said that they had considered memes “the democratization of humor,” which i think is fascinating. because there’s an effort to make you think that by proliferating someone else’s joke, you yourself become as funny or clever as its originator. there is money to be made from this. empires are built on that idea! but it doesn’t hold water. the word BACON or the word SCIENCE is not humor, it does not indicate the presence of humor; but it’s been positioned as a punchline for so long, we react to it as if it’s a fully-formed joke.
put it this way: we used to all own headphones of various qualities. then apple bundled those trashy white earbuds with all music players, and audiophiles everywhere said “man, they are really horrible for music — they have terrible bass response and kids are growing up thinking that all music is supposed to be tinny and shrill.” i’m not an audiophile, but i’ll take those guys’ word for it.
memes are those white earbuds, but for comedy.
I mean, I don’t know how 4chan feels about it either; like, while they champion and deliver the most current, richest meme ores, I don’t imagine they get too excited when the meme they got sick of six months ago has finally trickled down to Snorg Tees. When the meme is new and fresh and hasn’t been run into the ground, it has currency; it has value and real comedy.
I don’t think most of us get to see the memes in that nascent, budding phase. I think we internet peons only see them when they’ve already got Doctor Who and bacon and Portal crammed into every hole.
I think you and I are using different definitions of 'meme', then, Kris.
If we're talking about, say, those reaction comics that you just mentioned in Chainsawsuit, those are a meme, and, yeah, a very stale one at that. But I wouldn't, for example, just call sticking the word 'bacon' into another joke a meme. I'm…not sure what you'd call that.
We need more words for the proliferation of an idea in a rapidly evolving fashion, I think.
I see memes as a simple format of expression with an implied theme that is part of is construction, like a haiku, or a sonnet, or a three panel comic. They are fun and easy to do, which is great, as it makes them accessible, but yes there is also a lot of unfunny stuff put out there – but that happens with any form of expression.
We're in the internet age, where memes populate quickly in a many-nation culture, with no filters on their availability to you, so it seems sensible that you will come across a lot of unfunny. But over the course of history, how many novels have been written that haven't been worth the read, and they've been filtered down by editors, investors, and retailers…any format of expression can be disappointing in its entirety if its unfiltered for quality.
I can understand another issue that people might have with memes, and that is their very accessibility (and you seem to be alluding to it here). The degree of difficulty is not very high, and for anyone that works hard at creative expression, it can be frustrating to see how little effort it can take to be appreciated sometimes.
Its sad in a lot of ways, but when it comes to comedy, degree of difficulty is always just a value adder, not the product itself. How many times do you hear fans of shows like 30 Rock and Community talk about how cleverly those shows are written (which is certainly true), and that they can't understand why there aren't more viewers. I like both of those shows, but the things I've most laughed at in the last five years have been a Jackass movie and a webpage with a collection of humorously graffitied street signs. Yes, I'm ashamed of both, but I'm laughing now just remembering them.
For that matter, "wwhy shrek is piss? why shrek is piss? #italiano". Why is that such an excellent question?
In summary, I guess if you keep coming across memes and other things that annoy you, you should improve your filter because when it comes to creative efforts, unfiltered anything will be mostly shit.
I think likening memes to haiku – however degrading it might be to haiku – is apt. Advice Dog, the meme that started this whole thing in years past, actually did have a fairly precise structure: two words on the top, three on the bottom. Generally, the two lines were related in a cause/effect sort of way, and occasionally they were funny. Something that's interesting to note is when Advice Dog came around 4chan, I remember it being seen as a forced meme that wasn't going to go anywhere; seems like a pretty stupid idea now.
I've not really sat down and thought of a cogent argument for why memes bother me so much, but it seems like if a user on these meme farms has any vaguely relatable situation on your mind, it's just a matter of finding an applicable image and putting a one-liner in shadowed white font. The "identities" to these memes (Advice Dog, Insanity Wolf, etc) have trended towards becoming excruciatingly specific (things like Sheltered Suburban Freshman comes to mind, however there are most certainly exceptions) that they become, as Kris points out, little more than inside jokes amongst people who can relate. The greater degree of relatability, the more sludge is produced as a result. As he said in the post, "the return on investment is pretty goddamn low. unfortunately this is where the meme really takes root and shines." Is the degradation of the return and subsequent surge in popularity an artifact of people feeling they can contribute to internet culture, since the bar is set so low? Perhaps they're like haiku in more ways than one; if you ignore how they're supposed to be composed, all you get left with is a shitty haiku.
I believe you're quite right in saying that it's an unfiltered stream of ideas which necessarily brings a great deal of bullshit, however it shows no sign of dying out like these things so often do. It causes me to wonder: with the sheer accessibility of these templates and ease with which they can be created, is it dumbing down originality? Very little of these memes are actually the creators original thoughts; the entire joke is based in an idea that somebody else thought up, which has been rehashed over and over and over again with the original creator completely forgotten. Do people know who the artists who made the images that get repeated over and over again in MS paint comics (trollface, that FFFFFUUUUUU one, etc) are?
Perhaps I'm just getting too old for the internet.
I think it's too generous to compare the haiku, sonnet and three panel comic to memes in terms of a forced format. I think memes are more like visual knock-knock jokes. The majority of people really trying to push the envelope are children. There is a limit to how funny they can be. They are very accessible. You dont need to be funny or creative to conceive them. Telling someone elses generally has the same effect as telling your own, you have virtually no voice. Thankfully society recognizes this and assigns them an appropriate value.
I can only hope memes wont always be appreciated as much as they are now, maybe we just have to wait till the valuation drops back in line with the fundamentals.
Kris,
I just finished reading the book "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer
He makes the interesting point about forced formats sparking creativity. Almost think Star Wars before and after George Lucas got money. When you have constraints you have to be creative. When you can do whatever you want, you make the Phantom Menace…
I feel meme's are a fun way to try and creativity merge pop culture and jokes. There's a few problems though. As many standup comedians know – most of what you say isn't funny, you have to work at it.( Mike Birbiglia sums it up way better than me http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+Birbiglia/_/Delusio…
Also the internet lets everyone on. It's a lot like the Webcomic problem you guys brought up Webcomics Weekly. When the net was new, comics on the web were novel. After a while, it got saturated. So a lot of memes are bad, or knockoffs. Of course, a lot of the net is like that.
Anyway, food for thought.