The Trump administration – and the election that preceded it – has been variously held up as a nightmare for comedians (nobody could come up with anything more hilariously awful than this!) and a boon (we’ll have a field day calling out all this senseless hypocrisy!). In reality, the latter seems more like it, especially when it comes to internet humour, there being both a constant stream of material to react to and an audience desperately looking for immediate comfort. After all, all comedy is consolation (to bastardise a line from Alan Bennett), and the cultural echo chambers of the internet are the perfect place to encourage solidarity of sensibility – amusingly, of course.
Accompanying each frightening missive from the White House is a swath of memetic mockery. Yet memes don’t really function as satire: their message is too amorphous, the joke too wilfully inane and repetitive for them to serve as an actual critique. Instead, detached from narrative or rationality, they act as a short-lived release valve for when the stress of the presidency becomes too much. The Twitter account @TrumpDraws is just one example of the sort of meme-based consolation social media provides. Its owners Photoshop gifs of the president holding up executive orders to polite applause, but the text has been replaced with the kind of drawings a very young child might produce. Obviously, the central joke is that Trump is stupid, and the fact his idiocy is being not only sanctioned but lauded is scary. But the dogged repetition of the joke by the account detaches the disturbing context from the images, instead propelling them into the realm of surreality in a way that is hypnotically soothing.
That’s not to say memes always serve to neuter disturbing political machinations. There are some that, although rarely as successful as the 400K-strong @TrumpDraws account, use the repetition that is the cornerstone of memes to rally rather than numb. At the beginning of the month, Elizabeth Warren was silenced in the Senate while reading out a letter by Martin Luther King’s widow, as part of a speech attacking (the then nominee for) attorney general, Jeff Sessions. The man who ended her speech, Mitch McConnell, defended his actions with the phrase: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” The flagrant patriarchal overtones to this justification, as well as the act of silencing itself, encouraged Twitter users – in perhaps the speediest act of insult reclamation ever – to apply the epithet to many other inspirational women who defied oppression, from Harriet Tubman to Emmeline Pankhurst, Rosa Parks to Malala Yousafzai. By drawing a link between a woman’s disobedience and effectively canonised social justice warriors, the point was crisply made: in our patriarchal society, progress occurs when sexist and racist rules are not adhered to.
For those who would quite like to stop thinking about Donald Trump for one second, this month provided two inane memes to massage overstretched minds. The first was Dancing Winnie The Pooh, in which the beloved literary character is rendered in 3D and forced to do the Gangnam Style dance. The initial footage was uploaded in 2015, but its memefication came this year once people began fitting the gif to different songs after noticing that Winnie proved remarkably compliant; his dancing could sync up with pretty much anything, from Stormzy to the Sherlock theme tune. The second dose of novelty imagery came courtesy of Trash Dove, the name given to a gif from a set of Facebook stickers depicting a pigeon, created by illustrator Syd Weiler. It initially took off in Thailand, but this headbanging bird was soon cameoing in all sorts of previously existing meme templates.
Flashforward approximately seven seconds and Trash Dove is no longer an icon of innocent fun but working for the alt-right in order to help spread its heinous idea of banter. The movement, which first claimed Pepe The Frog as a neo-Nazi symbol, co-opted what was a largely meaningless meme and injected it with racist implications – an act that consisted of little more than a couple of people Photoshopping Trash Dove into Nazi imagery as an almost-ironic joke about the alt-right’s appropriation of memes, and word spreading about this development. But no matter the initial intent, Trash Dove is now tarnished with Trumpian trolling. Let’s hope they never get their hands on Winnie.
