MemesAreTrashChangeMyMind.png
Everyone is entitled to like what they like so keep on posting and laughing about your memes if you’re into them…but to me they are garbage and I wish the trend would die off.
I’m sure we all had that one annoying classmate growing up who incessantly quoted The Simpsons or SpongeBob…well…those quotes are the memes. That annoying kid is the “creator” of the memes. Can’t come up with an original joke so they parrot what funny people have said before in an attempt to get people to think they’re funny, too.
I won’t go as far as to say it’s joke theft but it’s pretty close. Its humor wholly hinges on original joke, the memer adds a modicum of context. You’ve seen the original joke repeated a hundred times already, is it really still funny to you?
Whenever an expansion/dlc/whatever drops for a new game I play a game of mental bingo of the exact memes that will get posted.
Something similar to how it was before? ItsTheSamePicture.png
A cute new animal/NPC? IfAnythingHappensToHim.png
An aspect of the game that didn’t get much love? DrowningSkeleton.png
Etc…just lazily slap an icon over the faces and get upvoted like crazy. It’s not a complicated joke and you know the punchline already… How are you still laughing about it?
Does anyone else feel that way? The prevalence of low effort memes makes me believe this is an unpopular opinion but I can’t be the only one who is tired of seeing the same jokes over and over and over
You are either giving memes way too much credit or musicians not enough…using the same chord progression is not at all the same thing as template memes. Maybe I shouldn’t have used song covers as an example because there’s way more room for expression and artistic evolution.
Let me try again with architecture…memes are like cookie cutter neighborhood developments. The house in the corner impresses you but walking down the block you see that every house is identical except for the flag out front. Are you still in awe by the 10th house?
You’re simply not noticing where those seemingly new ideas were pulled from. Sure, you have that cookie cutter development, and then that one super unique house. But is anything about that house actually unique, or does it just stand out from its immediate surroundings? Could you find other houses in other, faraway parts of Earth maybe, where the features of this “unique” house were copied from?
Music (trained) and architecture (untrained) are two of my biggest hobbies, I am definitely noticing where the ideas came from. Claiming that popular music is equally homogenous leads me to believe you’re not very attentive to that stuff so the accusation feels hollow
You’re still giving memes too much credit. They aren’t inspired by established jokes…they ARE the established joke. They’re adding a pencil mark to the Mona Lisa, it’s not like Warhol iterating on a soup can. Like my example… it’s just changing the flag out front and calling the house new
Art is the amalgamation of several existing ideas…Memes are come from ONE joke and 99% of it is unchanged.
I see what you’re saying, but it seems to me like an arbitrary line in the sand, where a certain amount of copying other influences is fine, but more than that becomes something else. I don’t see any clear reasoning for why a line in the sand should exist there and not elsewhere.
There’s no line in the sand, really. I don’t have any “hard rules” on the subject, I just don’t see the appeal.
How many times can you hear the same joke before you stop laughing?
Personally? Quite a few times, but I have an appreciation for meme culture specifically, and have spent a long time observing it and trying to understand. The answer to that question will mostly depend on how old the person you are asking is, I imagine.
It comes down to that old line that “there’s nothing new under the sun”. This is false, of course, but it communicates an important idea nonetheless.