What's it meme?

Following the success of the Fyre Festival documentary, particularly the @fuckjerry produced Netflix version, it’s come to my attention that people spend a great deal of time talking about memes and don’t really seem to know what they are. Your tweet is not a meme. An image with a caption is NOT a meme! Those are posts, and they are as common as they are singular. A single idea cannot be a meme. The backlash around unfollowing the desperately unfunny @fuckjerry rejects this shameless thievery as “meme aggregation”. A screenshot of a joke stolen from a professional comedian’s twitter and posted on instagram, this is going to shock you, is NOT a meme. This is not true for all of his posts, and there are certainly memes (albeit stolen ones) to be found in his feed.

I once made a mocking Spongebob post (note: this IS a meme) on a branded twitter account, but one woman took great offense to it. I had used a #RIP hashtag to honor recently deceased creator Stephen Hillenburg, to which this person conflated as using Hillenburg’s death to promote a product. This was clearly not my intention. I should also point out she referred to him as R. Hillenburg, so the outrage seemed somewhat manufactured in my opinion. She obviously doesn’t understand the meme, and more likely, probably doesn’t understand how memes work.

So what the hell is a MEME? What makes this an egg, and this egg a meme? A meme is a punchline to a joke that no one told. It’s the modern day equivalent of walking into a room and hearing “So I says to him ‘THAT AIN’T MY LEG!’” The image is the punchline. The caption provides context. There doesn’t necessarily need to be context, which is a joke unto itself. “They did surgery on a grape” as a comment on a random ESPN post is as much a meme as the screencap of the actual grape surgery. A fake screencap of a famous person’s tweet is a meme. A meme requires something recognizable, which is why memes morph through countless photoshop adaptations. Envisioning every context in which a single punchline can be presented is part of the challenge. It’s a cultural thought exercise. It shows us who is paying attention, it shows who is in on the joke.