Especially with niche internet culture like here on Lemmy. Very few people understand the “highly sophisticated” bean memes we’ve got.
“So a guy asking how not to shit for a weekend was funny for a whole month?”
When you put it that way we sound weird!
Wait, there’s actual context behind the bean memes? I’ve been missing out.
The not shitting guy came before the beans. The beans were mindless. The not shitting guy was an enigma.
Enigma? You mean enema?
No, enemas do the opposite of that
I have been around when the bean meme came and I still don’t know how that meme started.
:.|:;Classic, eternal.
The best memes are buried in 6 layers of irony and meta-references.
Got some reference material?
Is this loss?
I consider Loss to be common knowledge at this point
Which is why it’s a great meme to bury in six layers of irony and meta-references.
Ceiling cat haz contempt for your puny 7 years of historical warez. Leave Brittany alone with your shallow funnies.
finally, a meme I’m actually too young to understand! someone gimme lore pls
I get to be useful!
Ceiling cat is a reference to possibly the earliest generation of memes. They mostly involved cats. Ceiling cat was a popular one of a cat poking its had down through a hole in a ceiling, captioned “ceiling cat is watching you masturbate” or something similar. The odd grammar/spelling is of the same Era, where these cat memes would be spoken in the “voice” of a cat. The most famous example is “I can haz cheezburger”
Leaving Britney alone is a reference to an early Era of YouTube video, where an actor bawling at the camera ranted about how people were being too mean to Britney Spears, a famous pop star. It was hotly debate whether the contents of the video were genuine or acting. Remember, this was before Snopes, even.
I think that was everything?
thanks, I actually kinda remember ceiling cat now lol
Explaining loss humor is impossible
I still don’t understand how it’s funny
At this point we’re like three jokes deep.
The original reaction to the comic was kind of a collective chuckle of “Whahahahat the fuck?” Because the comic was like discount store brand Penny Arcade, irreverent bullshit gamer humor, and then comes the sudden plotline that the girlfriend character has a miscarriage.
Like, Loss itself isn’t bad in and of itself; telling the story of the character’s journey through the hospital with no dialog, it’s competent…but it stood in such contrast to what the comic had been about for so long and the audience just wasn’t on board with it that it became a controversy. And Buckley’s clap back against it and the following drama made it memetic.
At some point, the imagery became so recognizeable even in the abstract that it became a prank to communicate the idea of the comic in as abstract a form as possible, hence the “Is this Loss” meme. Somewhere between rickrolling and “you just lost the game.”
i always refer people to this documentary.
yeah…
especially if they don’t know what a trans person is
Who doesn’t know what a trans person is?
You’d be surprised lol
One of the funniest that shows just how little people know is this, a conversation I heard from someone like a month ago: “[name] is nonbinary, she uses they/them pronouns right?”
for context this is a Gen z person, not even a retired grandma who doesn’t go around queer people at all, there was a group of really fruity folk next to them about dieing for their whole conversation“his pronouns are they/them” type energy
I usually don’t have a hard time explaining referencial humor when it’s, like, an older movie that was super popular in my day to a younger person who hasn’t seen it; but memes are often inexplicable unless you just know.
Example:
:.|:;“The game”
No , why , why would you do that ?!
Me explaining why anything is the way it is at work…
Well you see…before I started they had this hare-brained idea, and I’ve been trying to fix it every year since.
Literally our lead developer:
“you wouldn’t be so confident in the results if you saw the half-assed code I whipped up for than in a single afternoon five years ago”
