Understanding Internet Memes and The Humorous Approach to Various Subjects

Memes are essentially created in order to provide people with the opportunity to observe different ideas and beliefs that occur throughout various cultures in either a comedic or light-hearted manner. Memes allow people to familiarize themselves with certain events and occurrences without having to actually undergo that experience themselves.

In a meme posted by Albert Lern via the online meme site known as 9gag, the meme depicts the varying degrees in pay scale between a CEO, his employees, and interns. The meme touches on this difficult and complicated subject by infusing a bit of a humorous aspect into it. This is done through intentional misspellings and letter repetition in the affiliated caption to help alleviate and make sense of the associated image. Generally, memes consist of a picture and a considerably short amount of text. The intention of a meme is to provide humor to its audience with minimal work and effort from their part, thus normally too much reading is not involved in this genre. People who browse memes tend to habitually skip over the ones that involve too much reading, thus the more popular memes are the ones that are both concise, yet humorous at the same time.

Memes are typically organized in a specific manner. It is not necessarily a standard; however, it is customary for memes to consist of a humorous caption, or explanation to help support the image or text that follows. Customarily, the meme will be composed of a central iconic image, and text typically at the top. The text usually incorporates non-artistic bold and heavy fonts and gaudy colors to enhance the intended message or impact of the meme.

With memes, there are several sub genres of slang. There is that of intentional misspellings, phonetic translations, letter repetition, and acronyms and initialisms. In regard to acronyms and initialisms, starting with lol, which means laughing out loud, there are numerous other acronyms that all exist in order to convey common phrases and ideas quickly and with less effort. Regarding letter repetition, it is more than a slang, it symbolizes a sort of dialect, frequently pointed as being utilized by young people, comprising of a similar letter in a word rehashed a few times for accentuation. For instance, in the meme by Lauren Jenkins via the online meme browsing site 9gag.com, she posts a meme of tide pods, with a caption referencing natural selection with numerous letter repetitions to demonstrate her frustration with the unusual situation. This meme exemplifies how a person can use this specific genre to bring up a conversation on a certain topic and elicit a wide array of emotions as a response in a concise and humorous manner.

Internet memes lack a standardization, however in great and successful memes, the pictures and its associated message complement each other very well. Its essence primarily is associated with it being concise, insightful, and the manner in which it evokes either a realization or humor. Through the use of internet slang, wittiness, and pop culture, the newly emerging genre of memes prevails.