‘Laughing our fucking asses off’ we are indeed. But at what cost? Have you ever asked yourself what memes bring us apart from temporary laughter? I’m not going to lie, I love memes. I send my partner a bunch of them every week on social media. They make us laugh, they give us jokes, sometimes “iconic lines” to repeat, later becoming part of our couple’s vernacular. What is there to hate about that? Nothing, right? Well, up to here, nothing indeed. It’s when we scratch enough the surface, that what once was a shiny veneer of memesque comedy eventually gives way to a rather concerning view. Are we falling in the trap of temporary pleasures again? “These violent delights have violent ends” William Shakespeare wrote already in 1597. Are we, in our excess of comedy, in our passion for reaching the extremes of every spectrum, driving ourselves to another violent end? While you might think I may be exaggerating, be assured of the contrary. So let us try to understand what something we love so much can also hurt us so much. Does meme-culture contribute to our seemingly growing apathy? If so, how?
Last week, nobody on the internet was able to avoid what happened at the 2022 Oscars. For many, what happened was nothing but another iconic moment of celebrity quarrel for us plebeians to enjoy with a bucket of popcorn on our laps. Since the original video came out, I haven’t stopped seeing photos, videos and tweets either parodying the Will Smith – Chris Rock altercation or rendering it a simple meme for social media users to avidly giggle at. At no instance whatsoever have I encountered a single soul taking a stand for the human character of the situation, or pointing towards the unlaughableness of such an incident. All I’ve seen was either mockery, comedy, or people’s eagerness to appropriate themselves the event and analyze it with no other tools than their own emotions. How about we analyze ourselves? Ah, Introspection, my good old friend. Let’s give him a visit, shall we?
The first point I’d like us to address is the increase in mockery – be it self-mockery or mockery of others. Although comedy as a whole is older than sliced bread, technology gave it powers it never had before – among others, the power to reach millions of people within a matter of minutes (sometimes seconds even, depending on who it comes from). This has contributed to humor becoming a more and more central part of our lives, and therefore to drive more and more people to seek therein a career or a time to shine, all via the help of technology. With time, being an online comedian became a real job which many where tempted to pursue – from your next-door neighbor to your friends, family members or co-workers. Likewise, comedy as a movie genre became one of the most famous of the industry – from series, to telefilms and box-office movies. From a historical perspective, comedy has always sold like hotcakes. Countless studies have in fact proven the beneficial effects of laughter on health, which says a lot about why we enjoy comedy so much. It makes us feel good, it helps us set our worries aside for a moment, and gives us the opportunity to spend a good time with our friends or family. Since the internet however, this increased dramatically, and a new type of humor was born: internet memes. I believe I do not need to provide any sort of definition here as I’m pretty sure we all know what a meme is by now. Memes became so central to our lives that even Wikipedia made the article dedicated to it part of a series on anthropology. Indeed, we can confidently say that memes became part of humanity, more precisely part of human behavior. Memes are a staple of culture as a whole. Because of its regenerative nature (in the sense that the notion of meme acts as an ever-reusable template to share a message), memes have gained a seat next to art, cuisine, language, and other major human inventions. The word meme was coined by British evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book “The Selfish Gene”, in the attempt to explain how ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve (memetics). He describes the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication. The first closest thing to an internet meme were the emoticons (parents of our current emojis), in the sense that those replicated or imitated human emotions and played the role of medium in the sharing of an information or message between two or more parties. Although internet memes initially grew as a concept in the mid-1990s, it isn’t until the late 2000’s to early 2010’s that we saw their real triumph, with memorable figures like Grumpy Cat or Bad-Luck Brian. Now in 2022, it is with the greatest certainty that we can all say memes aren’t going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, it seems as everything can become a meme now.
Indeed, with the growth and democratization of internet memes amongst social media users, also grew a less funny notion. I’m referring to the ‘life’s a joke’ mentality. This mentality, although not as common amongst older (and often less tech-savant) populations, has slowly embedded itself amongst younger demographics, like millennials, Gen Zs, and their even younger siblings, Gen Alpha. Because internet memes occupy a central place within the virtual world of social media, anyone who were to familiarize themselves with social media would not be able to avoid them, as they’re everywhere, on all possible social media platform. Younger generations, who either saw social media make its way within their lives as they grew up, or who were born and raised alongside it, developed a certain keenness for memes, and saw the way they express themselves online change because of them. Likewise, because the majority of young people tend to be more into ‘fun’ content than older adults, a lot of their presence and activity on social media are often centered on memes. Similarly, since the average screen-time for social media users is on the rise, it results in the latter encountering memes at greater frequency. The end result, apart from social media addiction, is a change in how we perceive things not only online, but in our real everyday life. Because we took the habit to spend so much of our time online joking about anything and everything, we end up taking the habit to laugh things off. And while this may be a positive in certain context, it also poses a threat to our ability to cope properly when bad things happen to us, or to respond appropriately when something unfortunate happens to somebody else than ourselves. In fact, because we got accustomed to see others’ suffering through the lens of comedy, we’re slowly becoming unable to show empathy and see the other as peer. We’re becoming incapable to sense the distress, the anguish, or the pain of someone else than ourselves. Instead, we see a picture, void from the emotional and human information it can carry. We see an image, almost equaling to a simple template, ready to be used and reused, all in the name of “humor”.
While the use of sayings like “laughter is the best medicine” persists up to this day (last time I heard it was this morning!), resorting to humor in excess can nonetheless become an unhealthy and immature coping mechanism on the long run. Indeed, although laughter can help us survive when time are hard (a 2001 study by Linda D. Henman titled “Humor as a coping mechanism: Lessons from POWs” explains the links between humor and resilience amidst wartime in the context of the 1955-1975 Vietnam War and how it helped some prisoners preserve a certain level of mental health), we cannot resort to laughter to all the possible situations. For instance, laughing at a funeral would be of very bad taste in most cultures. However, because social media has gotten us used to perceive anything as a meme, a lot of us unconsciously end up seeing almost everything as ‘meme-material’, despite the severe or tragic nature the situation can present. Yesterday for instance, while scrolling down my feed on Instagram, I came across a video that a college student published, in which her mother, who came to visit her, appears inebriated to the point of actually throwing up on camera, falling in her own vomit and knocking her head to the ground. The video’s caption read: “My mom visited me at college and things got wild”. The page which published the video wrote as caption “Good times” followed by a fire emoji. While a few individuals in the comments pointed at the inappropriateness of such footage on social media, as well as at the despicableness of exposing your own mother to the public under such a humiliating angle, most commentators seemed to enjoy the sight of this sickening view. Despite the mother’s drunkenness being (we can assume) her own doing, there is ultimately no incentive to show anybody under such a light – and even less the person who fed you, changed your diapers, put a roof over your head, dressed you, and probably even paid for you to be in college in the first place. In response to one of the comments pointing at the daughter’s viciousness, one commentator writes: “Bc it’s funny and not everything is serious”. Another writes “It’s the internet, who gives a shit?”. While we should be able to laugh certain things off, we also need to understand where to draw the line. Thinking that not everything is serious, although being a valid statement, is also a slippery slope towards the ‘life’s a joke’ mentality. “Not everything is serious” can easily become “everything can be laughed off”. This is in fact what we’re noticing here, from social media’s youngest users, but also from grownups and young adults who at their age, should be expected to have more of a moral compass than their younger siblings.
Going further down the rabbit hole of social media’s sinister comedy, we have the cases of three Black male celebrities’ pain turned into memes. The first one, which comes as no surprise given the current times, is Will Smith’s case. While Will Smith’s conduct at the 2022 Oscar ceremony was not exemplar, it wasn’t a situation that could be laughed about either, given the unfortunate and complex nature of the incident. But for meme-avid social media users, this was another opportunity to put on their clown costume, and get some laughs and likes from their online audiences. Already two years prior, in July 2020, Will Smith was turned into a meme – this time, for nothing but his facial expression upon hearing his wife’s amorous affairs. Will’s sadness and despair was turned into a simple picture for people to copy paste below a caption. When Tyrene Gibson broke into tears on video in 2017 amidst custody-battle over his daughter with his ex-wife, the world saw another opportunity to put forth comedy before a human being’s distress. Gibson’s picture remains used to this day in a plethora of memes, most people not even knowing who he is or what he went through. Lastly, during a 2020 campaign rally, Kanye West burst into tears in front of his audience. Although his mental-health battles being known to the general public, it did not prevent pictures of a crying Kanye West being used as meme, over and over again. These three example are sadly only the tip of the iceberg, if not a fragment of the tip itself. This also raises questions as to the values our generation promote. We often hear about notions like ‘toxic masculinity’, men not expressing their emotions, men acting too tough, etc. However, when they do open up, regardless of their societally high status, they get mocked and ridiculed. This behavior, coming from a generation which preaches mental-health awareness, is antithetical to the values we supposedly extol.
While we’ve approached the reasons behind the success of comedy as a whole, we haven’t analyzed the factors which make a lot of us rely more and more on humor as a necessity in life. Indeed, the entertainment industry has never been so flourishing. Amidst the pandemic, a lot of people (justifiably or not) felt like escaping reality, therefore often burying themselves under a layer of comedy, by fear or inability to face reality upfront. Because the environment in which we live is becoming more and more fast-paced (not to say chaotic or human-unfriendly), a lot of people are seeing their preexisting mental-health issues worsen with time. The despair, the anxiety of not knowing how to ‘get it together’, the fear that no one will understand, the disappointing lack of trustworthy individuals to confide into, present as temptations for us to leave all our problems behind and go have a laugh instead. Indeed, the more time passes, the more we notice how the capitalistic model of society we live in takes its toll on our sanity – the necessity to do more, to work faster, to stay longer, while not receiving an equivalent reward in the end. Because everything feels so fast-pace, a lot of us end up losing our footing in the deep waters of life. Ill-equipped to cope with high levels of stress, many resort to denial and create themselves a version of reality more pleasant to live in. Resorting to humor in excess to cope makes us lose sight of the seriousness of certain. As a result, we can be ill-prepared when challenges arrive, because we did not treat things with the gravity we should have. Likewise, by seeing humor as the only or main lens to see life through, we become incapable to help others when in distress, because we lack the tools to understand what they’re going through.
So where do we go from here? Do we just stop joking? Of course not. As a matter of fact, even if we wanted to we couldn’t stop. Having fun is in our genes. It’s a necessity. So is eating. So is drinking. So is communicating. So is having sex, to a certain extent. All those things contribute to our happiness. However, when done in excess, their effects become deleterious, because there needs to be a certain balance. With humor, things aren’t any different. The same way we can’t treat everything seriously, we can’t laugh about everything. And although where to draw the line can vary with notions like culture and customs, we need to understand that someone’s suffering has never, isn’t, and will never be an opportunity for comedy. Now the notion of suffering can indeed be relative, but there remains a common rule: putting ourselves in the other’s shoes.
Sources
https://www.statista.com/statistics/254115/favorite-movie-genres-in-the-us/
Anushka Amogh Kulkarni (2017). “Internet meme and Political Discourse: A study on the impact of internet meme as a tool in communicating political satire. Journal of Content, Community & Communication Amity School of Communication, 6.“
Dawkins, Richard (1989). “The Selfish Gene” (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 192.
Linda D. Henman (2001). “Humor as a coping mechanism: Lessons from POWs”.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/crying-tyrese
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-60896604
Aude Calloch 