Dat Boi
As the American writer EB White famously put it: “Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog – few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” In tribute, the first proverbial amphibian to be dismembered for nobody’s benefit this month is, in fact, a literal one. The Dat Boi meme, which has enjoyed a rapid rise to internet ubiquity in recent weeks, is a graphic of a frog on a unicycle accompanied simply by the call “Here come Dat Boi!!!!!!” and the response “O shit waddup!”.
So those are Dat Boi’s constituent parts, but what are the reasons behind his omnipresence? New York magazine summed up the joke in the following way: “The frog does not look like the kind of person you’d call ‘Dat Boi.’ He’s a frog, and he’s on a unicycle. And yet, his relaxed demeanor projects the kind of imperturbable mellowness you would expect in someone called Dat Boi.” Other possible factors behind the meme’s appeal is its endearingly low-res appearance, and the internal rhythm of the exchange.
here come dat bern pic.twitter.com/IhAqRivZSs
— dat boi (@datboimemes) May 27, 2016
The truth, though, is that there is little about Dat Boi that is intrinsically funny. Instead, getting the joke depends on your own context rather than his – that context primarily being whether you have seen Dat Boi before. Like the world’s emptiest callback, you have to be familiar with the character and his attributes (that he is called Dat Boi and should be greeted with the phrase “o shit waddup!”), before his photoshopped cameos in various other images – from Bernie Sanders’s tie to the surface of Mars – will make you laugh. One popular use of the meme attempts to weed out non-believers by offering multiple choice responses to his appearance (yes/no/o shit waddup!). It’s clear that Dat Boi is as much about the idea of being in on an internet joke as anything else. In some instances, he’s even been used as a symbol to represent meme culture at its most quintessentially inane.
Crying Jordan
Practically drowning in real-world context, on the other hand, is Crying Jordan. The latest example of the tear-stained-celebrity genre of meme (previous examples include snivelling Kim Kardashian and bawling Claire Danes) is the image of Michael Jordan weeping at his 2009 Basketball Hall of Fame induction. The photograph was published at the time, but as a meme it has gathered steam incrementally, and only in recent months has it begun to be photoshopped on to just about every other picture in existence.
The emotion the original image captured was that of being moved to the point of tears by your own achievements, but as a meme it now denotes a kind of self-pitying sorrow. This is simply because the image looks that way without context. What’s perhaps most interesting about Michael Jordan the meme, though, is how it relates to Michael Jordan the man. Jordan is not the pop-culture behemoth he once was, and although his way with a brand resonates now more than ever (he’s been recently referenced on Kanye’s Facts and Drake & Future’s Jumpman, both of whom are flogging trainers), there is now a possibility that Generation Z will come to know him more as shorthand for sadness than sporting champion or figurehead of an iconic clothing line.
With that in mind, there has been talk of his people wanting to monetise the meme, while some have expressed concern that the joke could eclipse Jordan’s legacy. In which case, nobody tell them about Craig David’s post-Bo Selecta! wilderness years.
Slender Man
Talking of trying to pin down slippery viral concepts and make them pay, ancient meme Slender Man is back. A pale, eerily elongated figure who first appeared on the forum Something Awful in 2009 as part of a Photoshop competition, Slender Man later acquired a narrative linking him to the abduction of children, and ended up inspiring a real attempted murder by two teenage girls.
Now a company called Mythology Entertainment have bought the intellectual property rights from creator Eric Knudsen, while Sony’s Screen Gems are said to be making Slender Man into a film. Surely, this is just the beginning of traditional entertainment formats attempting to harness the popularity of the meme; it can only be a matter of time before Dat Boi: The Movie is unicycling towards a theatre near you.
