Attack of the Memecats
Una Mullally’s
brief summary of internet humour in one of the many, many
round-up-of-the-year articles published last month (a filler of round-ups? A
google? An impending Christmas party?) caught my eye. It’s little more than a throwaway
comment, but the following in particular got me thinking:
The humour around such ventures is hit and miss, but there’s a
jaded predictability to the insistence of laughing at and then spreading
increasingly tired gags. Putting the “ah here, leave it out” Dublin holler over
footage of an aircraft flying into the Twin Towers just isn’t funny. Neither is
a guy looking into the camera on The Late Late Show. Or the laziness of Lolcat
text over endless photographs of strange celebrity expressions.
Some gif-based Tumblrs – the scrapbook for a generation – actually
yielded some laughs, in particular Dublin Gays and Hungover Owls. But there’s
still the nagging sense that trawling through photographs of people who look
like things is a colossal waste of time.[i]
I think this
is mostly right: there is something about internet humour which tends to make
it increasingly jaded and lazy. My best guess is that this is a combination of
two broad but plausible generalisations. Humour made for the internet tends to
have little depth or nuance. It must work almost instantly, getting a response
in the second or two that we typically give to a gif or photo, or the thirty
seconds that we might spend on a YouTube clip. That’s why so much of it relies
on celebrities or riffs on other well-known clips or
tropes such as Lolcat text. The pool from which successful memes are fished is
very broad (broader than any previous source of comedy) but very shallow.
Second,
successful ideas are reproduced. This isn’t new: everyone has had the experience
of hearing the same joke from different people, and usually they won’t have
independently come up with the same idea. The internet amplifies this effect,
by increasing the number of people who see something amusing and wish to pass
it on, and the numbers of individuals who want a slice of the comedy pie and
have enough spare time and technical know-how to get involved.
Something
similar has happened in music: the number of people putting out recordings to a
(potentially) mass audience is now far greater than ever before, and it’s
difficult to see it decreasing in the near future. The means of production and
distribution are no longer the exclusive property of a handful of large
corporations. But in music, this increases the pressure to stand out by being
different (principally by mixing together as many genres and textures as
possible). In comedy, the most striking effect seems to be endless variations
on existing themes. Ideas tend to get worn out by constant repetition; gems are
buried in the landslide of cheap imitations.
That said, I
wonder if Mullally’s criticism is a little too sweeping. After all, jokes (particularly
short, memorable ones) have been repeated and generated spin-offs for a long
time now, without well-established formats (‘What’s the difference between…?’ /
‘How many such-and-suches does it take…?’) becoming obsolete. The fact that
there are a lot of bad memes circulating doesn’t make the
pictures-of-people-who-look-like-things format, for example, a waste of time in
and of itself. It does make the case for greater quality-control, but on the
internet it was ever thus.
[i] A
number of these examples are specifically Irish, but as far as I can see they’re
pretty representative of the world-wide web.
