Casually Explained: Memes

so just to let you guys know if you're interested in looking at any merchandise we recently launched a new website with all new stuff that I'm really excited about so if you'd like to check it out you can find it at casually explain calm and take a look one of the most wonderful things about the Internet is the ability for people across the world to be able to communicate with each other and share information in the blink of an eye and for modern generations we've chosen to do that through things like this frog or this

frog or this frog and while memes were originally described as an element of culture passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means if we look now at their contemporary use I think would be much more accurate to define them as an element of culture passed from one individual to another through the internet the last part being redundant because if you're passing memes to someone you're obviously not going to be passing anything on to them genetically so in order to understand our current memes we have to start tracing them back to their origins and that

means starting in one of the first means for around 35 years ago which was leet-speak and this was when people swapped letters for numbers when they were typing because digital pictures literally hadn't been invented yet and there was nothing else to do and while this seems harmless it eventually led to their most recognizable usage which is in gamer tags that look like this and blog press diaries that look like this so then around the year 2000 the first picture memes emerged and we usually just screen caps from video games or online videos like do a

barrel roll from starfox 64 the hamster dance and eventually the all your base are belong to us meme from the terribly translated game zero wing and you might be thinking well how are these even used this isn't an awkward in a relatable social situation I can tag my friends with on Instagram and the thing is back in those days none of us had any friends so we would simply repeat the meme out loud in elementary school or post them in response to Yahoo Answers threads without context so as we move on a bit to around

2007 and social media was just getting big we started to see memes that were intentionally edited and contrived for comedic effect in order to get people to say nice meme did and the first one that comes to my memory unfortunately was the shoopdawhoop meme which was the imma firin my lazor face from the laser collection YouTube video which was then edited overtop of self from Dragonball Z and because of the introduction of the online view count and share we saw the moment that sprouted the still persistent idea in everyone's mind which was if I create

a shitty meme maybe I can get some imaginary points on the internet and while most rational people would see that as incredibly stupid and rightfully not want to be around you how many subscribers do you think they have and with the growth of sites like 4chan and reddit we saw the next big shift in the evolution of mean culture which was introducing a personal narrative and relatability to memes in the form of green tech stories and rage comics the first being cleverly constructed stories with absurd plot or conclusion and the latter being kids exaggerating the

struggles of their unremarkable lives which I of course participated in and while rage comics completely died off in little over a couple years for obvious reasons they did introduce iconic characters such as the troll face why you know me gusta and foreveralone guy among many other reactions that along with middle school we have collectively repressed so with that concept of reaction and relatability we saw the rapid popularization of our first modern meme format which was an image macro with text overlay and that came in the form of Pepe the Frog and advice animals and even

here you could still clearly see which one would stand the test of time emerging from there we saw one of the most influential genres of modern memes which are often called me IRL memes which are supposed to represent the author or me in real life these are memes of a self deprecating ironic nature that highlight the complete normality of everyday life by either exaggerating the pride of very mundane accomplishments depicting an inability to function in what's considered a very normal situation or both in the form of Wednesday frog then going slightly deeper you have me

IRL one word which is the same thing and more depressing but still funny and then even deeper than that you have to me IRL for me IRL which is literally just depression however in response to that we saw the simultaneous emergence of wholesome memes which is a convergence of me IRL and anti jokes where a depressing punchline is set up with a wholesome twist although unfortunately we have seen a lot of these memes border on motivational posts and compliments rather than actual memes which I personally find more insufferable than to me IRL from me IRL

for reasons I choose to ignore so closely related to me IRL we have one of my favorite types of memes which are starter pack memes and these are simply multi image collages that depict an unexpected stereotype with shocking accuracy that you thoroughly enjoy until you find one about you similar to those kinds of labelled memes we have progression memes which are constructed with logical progression through each of the images and while these can be very versatile they also usually only last until people can't add any more progression without losing your attention which is around four

pictures so now if you take a regular person who looks at memes for enjoyment rather than coping you see another genre of questionably executed memes that are effectively made to make you feel good and I think the perfect example of that is rare puppers which is a wholesome dog parody of rare pepe which are commodified pepe photo shops and also a whole genre of animal gifts spelled with alternating capitals and words like dog o pupper and other baby talk that I intellectually despise but can't stop looking at because I'm so happy thankfully gay keeping the

art form we of course have dank memes which remains at Mach other memes that are past their shelf life or used in a non comedic overplayed fashion and these are generally crafted by the fine Minds over 4chan who were one push away from falling off their own edge in a similar vein we also have self satirizing memes like deep-fried memes and reddit subreddits like meme economy that buyer sells stock and upcoming formats and if I know anything about people on the Internet which I am one of I know that memes are seen a lot like

high art which means I know that at this point in the video there are people who'd say so when you get into the real memes and there are people who say you lost me at rare peppers because they literally opened a new tab to look at those and well I know people the first category probably don't think I know anything about memes and people the second category are questioning if they still want to see me in real life it's literally impossible for me to cover every sub-genre of meme but do bear in mind the list

does go on to include anime memes desks besito memes shrek memes b-movie memes Scooby Doo memes spongebob memes black people Twitter memes white people Twitter memes insane people Facebook memes mad latin memes that happened memes poor and memes Toy Story memes Thanos memes where did the soda go meme stock image memes minecraft memes Gus Johnson's entire YouTube channel slaps roof of car memes Kermit memes Fortnite memes and literally thousands of others that does make you wonder the final quest which is with so many memes being created and abandoned where do these memes come from and

where do they go and the answer to that is fairly simple first an actual piece of content is created the meme is born on 4chan filtered and popularized on reddit spread to your average person on Instagram Tumblr and Twitter meme is dead Jimmy Fallon uses it in a segment your parents and large corporations use it incorrectly on Facebook and 4chan makes fun of those people with new meme and the cycle continues which makes you wonder where in the process this video might be and according to one of my favorite quotes about comedy explaining a joke

is like dissecting a frog you understand it better but it dies in the process [Music] you