The Meme Textbook Part 2: The Language of the Internet | Page 30

Collective
Understanding
A heavily important factor to understanding
meme culture is the progressive evolution and
overlapping of memes. As the culture of the
internet has developed, humor has beccome
more abstract and dependent on prior meme
culture. It is innate in many inernet users to
understand earlier memes and the contexts
in which they existed, especially when appro-
priating their formats. In it of itself, the com-
bination of memes has become a meme.
Humor is often derived from the ability to
understand the reference to the earlier meme.
Fig. 1 is one such example of this. This twitter
user sets up the joke within the known rhym-
ing scheme of “roses are red, violets are blue
[honey is sweet and so are you].” The second
line is in reference to a popular meme from
2016, which was the death of a gorilla named
Harambe in the Cincinnati zoo because he
killed a child who had gotten into his enclo-
sure. As a result, the internet rallied around
his death and it became one of the longer run-
ning memes in current meme culture, which is
notable since the half-life of memes has got-
ten progressively shorter. (see page 42) The
image of former president George W. Bush is
a reference to a popular meme from 2006 that
has never truly left the culture of the interet,
which was that the attack on the Twin Towers
on September 11, 2001 was an inside job. The
phrase that became popular was “Bush did
9/11.” Thus, this tweet actually reads “roses are
red, Harambe’s in heaven, Bush did 9/11.” The
collective understand of meme culture is crucial
to understanding this joke since it is not explicit.
30 | Part Two: The Language of the Internet
fig. 92
Another example of this is Fig. 92, which uses
the imagery of the meme “Gee Bill.” This meme,
also known as “Gee Bill! How Come Your
Mom Lets You Eat Two Wieners?” appeared
on 4chan in 2008. The meme is based on an
advertisement for skinless hot dogs made in
the 1940s. Many users made parodies with
photoshopped on characteristics of various
popular culture, from video games to histori-
cal figures. As the meme evolved, users began
making photomanipulations of it, including
changing the text and creating comics. Fig.