The first world war had poetry, Vietnam had protest songs and the 2016 EU referendum had memes. Internet memes were the immediate and primary creative response to Brexit (if you discount the Leave campaign’s imaginative interpretation of truth, responsibility and the number 350m).
Memes may have played a part in spreading information and misinformation for both sides, but their ultimate contribution was comic relief. From picture-sharing hashtags such as #CatsAgainstBrexit and #DogsAtPollingStations, to the image of the union jack pasted on to the face of the woman in the Gordon Ramsay idiot sandwich clip, meme-makers were working overtime to encapsulate various degrees of despair in easily digestible pics and gifs. In some ways, it all felt a bit “sticking Crying Jordan’s head on the £10 note while Westminster burns”, but then you know what they say: comedy equals tragedy plus 30 seconds on Photoshop.
Nowadays, television comedy can’t compete with that sort of topical humour, and even if it were speedier, nobody could invent a character who clapped more strangely than Michael Gove anyway, so what’s the point? But memes still draw heavily on popular TV shows of the past, and by recycling and reinventing their images and jokes they are able to wring even more amusement and emotional resonance from them.
Two shows that are heavily appropriated due to their visual distinctiveness and nostalgia-friendly lifespans are The Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants. Recent months have seen SpongeBob’s disgruntled-looking prehistoric ancestor Primitive Sponge deployed as shorthand for all sorts of primal panic and frustration. Meanwhile, people have been re-editing scenes from The Simpsons into a series of videos collectively known as Simpsonwave. These are clips that have been discoloured and distorted in the style of old VHS tapes and set to the sound of vapourwave (an internet-birthed genre characterised by sampling certain kinds of 80s music in a satirical fashion).
The result is a set of surreal films that enables The Simpsons to expand its evocative scope by transporting its characters and tropes into a more dreamlike and impressionistic world. When you look at it like that, staring at a looped, slow-mo clip of Bart Simpson dancing for three minutes seems like less of an utterly absurd way to spend your time on Earth.
Sometimes, more obscure moments in TV history are given a second life as memes. In Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s 1999 show Rock Profile, Lucas plays a version of Shirley Bassey who haughtily dismisses various singers with the insult “she doesn’t have the range”. This month the phrase exploded in popularity on Twitter thanks to @KingBeyonceStan, who used it as the conclusion to a list of bullet-pointed descriptions about musicians (Madonna, for example, “faked having the range in Evita, embarrassed Prince in Heaven, she doesn’t have the range”).
Madonna:
— Lutrille Bluth (@KingBeyonceStan) June 21, 2016
-faked having the range in Evita
-embarrassed Prince in Heaven
-she doesn't have the range pic.twitter.com/wtCvpweTKa
As “she doesn’t have the range” spread, it mutated into an insult that Twitter users could apply to anything at all, from Thomas Edison to a pair of knees. Although this is typical of the way a meme spreads – eventually the humour comes to rely on repetition and callbacks – it is worth noting that this is also the way it’s used in the Rock Profile sketch: the punchline consists of Bassey claiming members of her audience are unable to throw their underwear onstage because they “don’t have the range”, proving how the life cycle of a meme mimics more traditional comic structures.
Still, memes have been one of the few genuinely novel subcultures of recent times. But as they move from obscurity into the mainstream they are losing their counter-cultural cache. Never has that been more evident than during the events of last month, when US breakfast show Good Morning America tweeted the well-established meme of Kermit The Frog drinking tea (usually overlaid with the text “but that’s none of my business”) alongside the hashtag #tealizard. Amused by such an apparently ridiculous blunder, social media users took the faux pas and used it to generate more comedy, creating other erroneous names for Muppets characters and attempting to invent whole separate #tealizard memes. Actually, as it turned out, #tealizard wasn’t a mistake; it was a reference to a more niche meme by Twitter user @TrillBallins, who had been referring to Kermit in such a way for a number of months.
At their essence, memes are a coded way of communicating with a select group of people, but this function is being eroded by media coverage and the fact they are currently the primary booster of Brexit-related morale. For now, it seems they’re becoming in-jokes without the exclusivity; in other words, not quite as funny as they once were.
