'MEME'ICRY

This one’s for you and meme!

Okay, bad joke. But true nevertheless. These days our entire virtual world seems to be full of memes. Everywhere you look, you find one friend sharing a meme with another because of its intrinsic humorous value. They have become such an important part of our adolescent lives that we’ve even started COMMUNICATING through memes. One of my friends loves saying, “Y U NO DO THIS?!” and another had a meme war with her uncle. This new fad for memes escalated to such an extent that we just threw a surprise birthday party for our best friend with a ‘meme theme’. All of us wore meme masks and screamed “SURPRISE”, and frankly he looked a tad bit scared when he entered.

Who wouldn’t be, after seeing a face like this screaming, “SURPRISE”.

For the uneducated (or simply lazy) who’ve never heard of them, memes, or if you’re a pricy terminologist, internet memes are essentially ideas prevalent throughout the Internet spreading like wildfire for no logical reason at all, distracting us from whatever we’re doing or would like to be doing (Pshh Board preparations!) because of their droll nature. The word ‘meme’ was used by Richard Dawkins in his work ‘A Selfish Gene’ in 1976 wherein it became virulent in just a few hours. Rage comics are an essential part of meme-ing and are usually simple cartoon drawings of a person expressing a readily identifiable emotion. Since the first ever one expressed rage, the name stuck on as ‘rage’ comics although it isn’t always the emotion expressed.

So now, since we’ve got that history lesson behind us (I’m a Humanities student, what can I say?) let’s move on to the cool part. The part where I describe in detail five rage comics which have become famous solely because they mimic a certain person’s expressions.

#5. Butthurt Dweller

Beware. The mug on this rage face is clearly unattractive. But you know him. He’s that one guy you always find everywhere, sorely lacking any aesthetic approbation or seeming to have none of the recommendations that prove him to be a quality member of the human race and yet manages to achieve superiority over every other person. This fellow, unshaven, pimply, with long greasy hair yet a receding hairline, bespectacled and scruffy, still sports a smug, smarmy look that makes you feel inferior to him. Giving no acquiescence to his unseemliness, he considers himself above each and every person around and the memes reflect that. He’s usually the one with no formal education, still living with his parents, no means of livelihood, usually found either in his room behind a video game console or sequestered in the local bar, shunned from society because of his distasteful, judgmental behavior. This meme also goes by the name of ‘Gordon Granudo’. This comic was inspired by a certain Finnish gentleman known as KimmoKM.

#4 Are You Serious? Rage Face

The ‘Are you serious?/Seriously?’ rage face is a comic drawing of a perplexed looking David Silverman of American Atheists, captured when he was engaged in a hot debate with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. The dialogue went somewhat like this:

O’Reilly: I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.

                                     

Silverman: Tide goes in, tide goes out?!”

O’Reilly: The water, the tide- it comes in and it goes out. It always goes in, then it goes out. … You can’t explain that. You can’t explain it.

Yes. I’m speechless too because if a highly educated member of the press does not know elementary science, then what hope lies for us mortals?

#3. Obama Rage Face

This rage comic was sparked off when President Barrack Obama was spotted wearing a sturgeon face in a press conference during an official visit to the UK. This comic has come to represent the emotion that one feels when everything goes better than was expected.

Just what did they see?

This photo was later anointed the ‘picture of the day’ by the British news media. It made rounds on social networking sites and sites like ‘9gag.com’ and ‘photofails.com’. Later the words ‘Not Bad’ got attached to the rage comic and it was used whenever something was approved by the creator.

#2. You Don’t Say?

This rage comic is my personal favourite as its inherent sarcasm is very endearing. It is a comic drawing of actor Nicolas Cage and is used whenever someone makes an extremely obvious or stupid statement.  The image of Nicolas Cage was taken from a scene in the 1988 black comedy movie Vampire’s Kiss’, which revolves around a troubled young literary agent’s descent into insanity after convincing himself that he is turning into a vampire. This unique facial expression was taken from a particular scene in which Cage’s character Peter Loew torments his secretary in a very diabolical manner accompanied, of course, by the obvious accoutrements- Scary violins in the backgrounds, the secretary’s mousy, albeit terrified, appearance and Cage’s gooseberry eyes popping out. It’s scary. Brr.

#1. True Story

This is it. The big one. The one we’ve all been waiting for. The True Story rage face inspired by Neil Patrick Harris or (as we all know him) Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother, smiling paternally, holding a wine glass aloft. It often appears at the end of rage comics indicating that it was based on a true story even when it seems to be obviously spurious. In the series, Stinson often uses the catchphrase ‘True Story’ at the end of every anecdote, for example:

True story Mr. Stinson, true story indeed.

So here they were. Rage comics that mimicked the facial expressions of both the well known and the obscure alike. Rage comics that have become an essential part of our lives. And rage comics that will hopefully live on and endure.

Shuchita.