Memes, Comedy, and Irony

Born too late to explore the earth. Too early to explore the stars. Born just in time to explore the MEMES XDDDDDD

Most days of the week, my roommate or one of my friends shoves their phone into my face, forces me to stop what I am doing, and makes me look at some meme they found on Instagram or TikTok. Sometimes it’s funny, but most of the time I just do a passionless “hehe” to placate them. Why do they feel the need to make me watch it right now? Send me it. If I like it, I will like it more if I can watch it on my own time. But, it seems that memes mean something very different to normies than they do to us. I mean, at least, to me. I make memes. I make memes and I make Soyjaks, and I make substacks. And sometimes I make video edits. It’s what I do. It’s what I enjoy. On iFunny I have seldom ever uploaded a meme that wasn’t mine, without the context of the meme making it obvious that it wasn’t mine. The whole journey… It’s been by these hands, on the iconic mythologized iPad…

On iFunny this is harder than ever, due to the rapacious automod system. My creativity is stifled, part of the reason I have a presence on another platform some of you might know about. But I have learned to live with it. I think what shocks me the most, is witnessing the world of Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok. Here, there are many meme pages, but no original memes. No, a witty remark does not count as a “meme”, Twatter zoomer shitlords. Just what is a meme I will get to later, but this just shocks me. It shocks me how they are treated and how they see themselves. These people contribute nothing and yet they get millions of followers. When you ask them about their lifestyles, both they and their followers seem bewildered of the idea that someone… Some hermit… Would actually MAKE his own memes. They don’t even seem to fully internalize how exactly memes come into being, like those tribal Aboriginals who don’t fully understand the relation between sex and childbirth. You may say, “oh, but they’re sharing funny memes” and that’s exactly the issue.

Now, when I say I “make memes” I mean the colloquialism (usually). The “meme” colloquially refers to any comedic internet video or image. Witty remarks aren’t considered as memes because there is no visual or audio aspect to them, it’s just words. But then there is another sense of the word meme, where a meme is actually a class of elements which themselves are memes. Like, “Pepe the Frog” is a meme, even though this doesn’t refer to any particular instance of a colloquial meme involving Pepe the Frog. “Pepe” is the class of all internet media featuring Pepe. The meme in this sense, is an actual meme in the sociological sense of a social behavior repeated and passed along through imitation. Some memes spread because of something in-themselves not related to potential meme status, but another reason internet memes tend to spread is because memes essentially function as “inside jokes” which aren’t really all that inside. They affirm your status as one of the “initiated”, and while this may sound like the meme is only enjoyed superficially, that isn’t true. This really does makes the jokes funnier.

Jokes aren’t necessarily funny because you can explain the twist or inconsistency, and often they’re funny because you can’t explain them. You either get it, or you don’t. Often times “getting it” is completely unexplainable because understanding it intuitively requires having been in the exact context in which it was generated. The events which constructed this joke also constructed you and did not construct other people. In my opinion, the reason the “left can’t meme” is because humor evolved as a means of discrediting marginalized groups’ grievances, and strengthening bonds between the ingroup. Shitlib comedians (and frankly all comedians) pretend that comedy is about “speaking truth to power”, but speaking truth to power in humor is more a means of relating to the audience (who usually isn’t in power) rather than because it’s actually all that funny. Talking about how bad politicians and fat cats are is essentially like talking about the weather at this point, it’s meaningless small talk. This is also why so much left-wing humor is self-deprecating. They have internalized their allegiance with the outgroup so much that the only “dark humor” they are willing to do is to literally just make fun of how pathetic they are, and it comes off as begging for pity. comedians are not really here to maximize laughter. Going to watch a comedian is more about having a bit of a laugh, and having something to talk about with friends. The funniest things I have ever seen have all been things which would not be funny if you explained them, it was just stupid shit. Again, either it connects with you intuitively or it makes no sense.

If you think that the right can’t meme, well that’s fair. Because, it’s not really that the right is good at memes so much as it is, the memes are good at happening to be right wing. I remember years ago, I heard of this study that found that left-wing people laughed at not-PC jokes at about the same rate as right-wing people. But I don’t have it on me. If I find it I’ll post it in the comments.

But I digress…

Anyways, yes, memes function as faux inside jokes. But this also means that memetic value is determined by the size of the initiated group and the amount of memes of this class. The amount of memes is important because the less common the meme is, the more of a surprise it is when you see it. Surprise is a key element to humor. I mean, this is pretty obvious. This is why babies laugh at peek-a-boo. But also the amount of people aware of the meme is important, for two reasons: 1) Again, things are funnier when they are understood to be “esoteric”. We like figuring out things we perceive as difficult to figure out. 2) Memes are a humor crutch. The more a meme spreads, the less authentic it will be. The meme first began to spread because for some reason people thought the earliest elements of it were funny. At its late stages it has become a bloated thing. Instead of people using the meme to generate new and creative content, you just end up getting unoriginal memes which rely on shoving this meme-class in your face for a cheap laugh. It is like a dying sun. The larger it gets, the cooler it gets, and the larger it is, the faster it dies. This is why stealing memes for your “meme page” is not an act of kindness but an act of parasitism, taking the memetic momentum and bending its trajectory to create momentum for your own social swagger. They think they’re doing the right thing though, like Black people blaring their music out at 11:00 PM thinking they deserve appreciation for blessing you with their favorite music and vibes.

Memes are not intrinsically bad. Again, I make a lot of memes. But, I do sort of question if they’re overall a good or bad thing about society. The joke relies much more on itself rather than on the context, which is nice. It’s… Authentic. This is why memes lose value as they grow, because without the social context in which they were formed they often times just become bad jokes which are shoehorned in over and over. But what I was shocked by, was that many of these ass-clown millennial meme thieves consider themselves to be funnier than every other generation on the planet. I know, it’s shocking. These people making fun of “boomer humor”. The reason being, at least from what I’ve observed, that prior generations’ humor was not dominated by the malaise of Irony which not only dominates humor today, but in fact, pervades the entire American mode of being. It is among the worst catastrophes to ever happen to a society ever.

Irony in this context is tricky to define. I’m not against Irony in humor at large. Everything is good in moderation. But Irony refers to something much broader here, where when things are communicated, they’re not actually communicating the thing-in-itself, but rather the way the thing is perceived. Instead of expressing the thing, you are internalizing the expression of the thing. It’s pastiche. It is an identity of the second order. This ties into what we understand here on earth as “irony” because it demands unseriousness and nonchalance. You can’t take anything seriously in this context because you aren’t taking anything. You’re just mimicking or satirizing expressions of things in culture. I’m sorry, this is very difficult to explain. Some of you might remember, I wrote on iFunny a while back about this but it was banned for no reason. As basically all longposts are on there. But I used two examples which I think will help show what I’m trying to say.

First is the renaissance of Goth and “alt” culture. On another completely separate post I mentioned how “Alt” in 2006 had Eating Disorders and cut themselves, meanwhile “Alt” girls in 2023 have Obesity and Xanax. Pretty funny, nyeh? But anyways, these new Alt people don’t actually have the original authenticity of the old Goths and Emos, instead they are looking to place themselves in the cultural perception of the Goth. They want to be like how non-Goths view Goths, and all of the things associated with that (like a general sense of 2000s Nostalgia). The second example I used, which is worse but it entertains me, is the “silly little x” memes. The use of silly here is clearly under a layer of irony. Like, calling themselves “silly little wizards” laughing at their “silly little pictures”, it’s all so obviously under a layer of irony and sarcasm. They just want to embody the sort of infantilized idea of a “silly” person because they don’t like adulting. But they’re not silly people. And they are definitely not Wizards, they just find it sort of humoring. When some Transvestite-adjacent assclown starts talking about how they’re in their “silly little wizard era” proclaim to them that they will never be a wizard! They have no incantations! They have no spellbooks! And WATCH! Watch how they recoil!

Anyways, this irony culture leads to an avoidance entirely from seriousness. This is why every Zoomer speaks in ebonics, it’s the language of nonchalance. Speaking in proper English gets you considered stuck up or “🤓” or “Daredevil Dog”. The only conviction you’re allowed to have is “being a decent fucking human being” and “do whatever as long as you aren’t affecting others”. Youth fashion is entirely unserious. Streetwear is meant to look “lowkey” and brand clothing is a sarcastic criticism of actually wearing high quality clothing. Contemporary art is a satire of the seriousness of prior generations of art. The Shitlibs accuse the right of “irony poisoning”, because the only way for people to accept heterodox beliefs is to cover it in a casing of irony. This doesn’t make the beliefs ironic, it means that people aren’t expected to take these things seriously and so must only come to put the pieces together after having “joked” about it a bit first. Fascist movements fail today partially because they’re so unironic. Look at these guys… Dressed up in these blaring uniforms marching around acting like Team Rocket… That’s ridiculous because… IT JUST IS, OK!?!?

Even in our circles, LARPer is a regular insult. What’s wrong with LARPing? A lot of LARPers are not so bad people. But it’s “nerdy” even though most of us already like “Nerdy” things. Well I’m here to say that LARPing is not bad, and you should not feel silly or bad LARPing. As they say, Napoleon LARPed as Caesar, Caesar LARPed as Alexander, and Alexander LARPed as Achilles! Just let go of the Irony. These Geeks calling you a nerd… Who cares? I would rather be a nerd one thousand times over than surrender to the Geekdom! This is another topic I will discuss one day, Nerds v. Geeks and how the Nerd Geek war defined our new age

The rise of Irony culture seems more to be a cause rather than an effect, but it may tangentially have to do with the feminization of society. Not only the rise of influence of Women, but the decline in Testosterone among men. High Testosterone, both in the Womb and in everyday life, is associated with more willingness to have heterodox beliefs and attitudes given the same implicit biases. Lower testosterone, be it in the womb or in everyday life, results in less ability to differentiate between what is beneficial to speak of for social points and what is actually correct/how they themselves authentically view the world.

I believe in 2016-2019 there was a chance to escape from the Irony malaise. This is where you started to see a lot of the “post-ironic” memes. But in recent years this seems to have faded. I look at my old meme folder from 2016. I used to cringe at it. Now I see that most of them are funnier than the memes I see now. Le sigh…