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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Tim Dowling

How Joe Biden became the US’s meme-in-chief

Joe Biden on the cover of the Onion’s President of Vice spoof.
Joe Biden on the cover of the Onion’s President of Vice spoof. Photograph: The Onion

A successful meme is not much compensation in these weird times, but it’s something. Over the past week, the vice-president of the US, Joe Biden, has emerged as the star of a collection of captioned photographs. They depict him as more than a little disinclined to ease Donald Trump’s presidential transition. In one, he claims to have changed the White House Wi-Fi password to “PssyGrbbr45”. In all of them, Obama looks and talks like an exasperated parent.

Biden the comic character – an incompetent, coarse, ungovernable buffoon – has emerged by consensus over the years. If it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the man himself, it isn’t really meant to. It’s probably more a characterisation of the office of vice-president. It’s easy to imagine anyone in that position feeling restless, underoccupied, and mischievous. It’s also a role that’s kept the outspoken Biden half in shadow for eight years. He is, relatively speaking, a blank canvas. Give him any sort of alternative persona and it will stick.

The satirical website the Onion went so far as to portray Biden as a lecherous, hard-partying hellraiser in the habit of washing his Pontiac Firebird Trans Am on the White House lawn. The caricature was predicated on nothing (Biden is, among other things, teetotal), but it took hold.

If the real Joe Biden barely figures in all of this, it should be said that he is a little gaffe-prone. At a ceremony to mark the launch of Obamacare, a microphone caught him telling the president that this was “a big fucking deal”. He’s also almost imperviously good-natured, and reportedly enjoyed the Onion’s wide-of-the-mark depiction.

The post-election Joe Biden in these latest memes has been specially updated for the occasion. He’s bitter, petty and unable to play along with the dignified charade of transition, a class-clown hero. Above all, he appears convinced that, in the present circumstances, only pointless, completely idiotic gestures will suffice. For a lot of Americans, that captures the mood perfectly.


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