Read on Twitter
I will never not be grateful that I lived through the golden age of memes - perhaps humor’s finest hour https://twitter.com/oldmemearchive/status/1358858415502721028
*zero sarcasm* I mean this with all my heart
Ok because it’s late and Twitter is kinda dead I’m gonna go on a thread about this:
What I love about this meme is what I love about meme culture in generally: the absurdity, and the anonymity. (I also love how some memes are so niche that you have to know 1000 things to get them... they hold a special place too, but this meme is not one of those.)
First, the absurdity - rooted in the mundane, this joke just takes a normal idea of hiding a phone in a book and spirals it into insanity. But the best part about absurd humor is that it is inoffensive, and not mean-spirited.
In the last half century of comedy, there’s been such backlash to the notion that comedians don’t just have free reign to belittle people who are different. How often did we hear, “PC culture is killing comedy,” or “nobody can take a joke anymore. Yet, fast forward to Twitter,
...Instagram, and Reddit, and random nobodies with handles like joeschmoe6969 and spongebobsquarehams makes me laugh harder day in and day out than any professional comedian. (Shout-out to the good comedians, though, they’re still out there.)
But that brings me to my second point, the anonymity, or maybe better put: the democratization of comedy. Sure, there are great Tweeters and Redditors who produce gold on a regular basis, but some of the best jokes I’ve ever read on this site were one-offs. Anyone can write...
...the joke of the year, and if it’s good, it’ll spread. Better still, there’s an ability to build on jokes, which this meme likely was - one person posted the original pic, followed by someone one-upping, until it reached a peak absurdity and circulated as a package deal.
And we all have access to it on a daily basis, and boy do we need it, living in this late-stage-capitalist wasteland choking us of every last bit of our joy and dignity.
Thank God for the memes.
Thank God for the memes.
That got dark at the end. Here’s another all-time-great absurdist comic to end on a brighter note.
