MEMES

[ShadowBrain]

Oh, man, AMB. I remember looking at a few of those long, long ago...

[CrossEyed7]

The Meme Timeline dates Dancing Baby to October 21, 1996, and Ate My Balls to December 31, 1995. Both, however, are younger than Dysfunctional Family Circus (Jun 1995), the Trojan Room Coffee Pot (1993; the original webcam), B1FF, the development of Godwin's Law (both c. 1990), the first emoticon (September 18, 1982), and many other classics.

[Jake]

But yeah, some internet memes are great, some suck. Most of my favorites are troll memes, like Moon Man, the only good meme from that rotting pile known as YTMND.

As for irl memes, don't really care for them.

[Luigison]

Real life memes happen all the time.  One person dances and then others join the dance.  Someone claps and/or laughs and others do likewise.  Someone states a political or religious believe and others agree.  These type of memes have been around for a very long time, but in fairly recent times companies and interest groups have taken advantage of them.  Sitcoms recorded in front of a life studio audience with people paid to get the crowd to laugh/clap.  Paid political pundits at rallies to get the crowd pumped-up.  Real life memes go beyond such obvious examples.  Cultural, religious, and political believes can even be classified as memes. 

[Glorb]

Hell, you can even count human civilization as a meme: one dude started messing with some rocks, which led to other dudes messing with sticks as well as rocks, which led to fire as well as weapons, which led to weaponizing fire, which led to territorial disputes, which led to cities, which led to language and culture, etc. etc.

[PaperLuigi]

Religion is a meme...that sounds about right.

In fact, it sounds 100% correct.

[ShadowBrain]

Hell, you can even count human civilization as a meme: one dude started messing with some rocks, which led to other dudes messing with sticks as well as rocks, which led to fire as well as weapons, which led to weaponizing fire, which led to territorial disputes, which led to cities, which led to language and culture, etc. etc.

Oh good, someone sees it that way, too.

[Weegee]

For the sake of the discussion, perhaps we should limit our definition of "MEMES" for the time being to contextual internet humour. Otherwise we'll be arguing over the meme which is the societal norm of wearing clothes in public.

[ShadowBrain]

Agreed (and always have).

[Glorb]

Erm,

I speak in this case not only of internet memes, but also cultural and pop-cultural memes.

[CrossEyed7]

"And when you stop to think about it, even the ground, the earth is like a huge spring. It transmits shock from one point to another."

[Mr. Wiggles]

As I've said before, internet memes are, to me at least, extraordinarily unfunny, and a lazy attempt at real humor.

Define real humor.

[Glorb]

Internet memes attempt to create humor by taking something, be it a phrase, picture, facial expression, or concept, and saying, doing, or repeating it over and over again with occasional variations, on the off-chance that sooner or later, something funny will be produced.

Furthermore, these days internet memes are pretty much all completely forced; unlike concepts that evolved naturally into the public consiousness (for example, the Rickroll, which started as a surreal one-off joke), pretty much any internet meme you see today will have been started with the sole purpose of creating an internet meme.

Real humor doesn't rely on force-feeding you something over and over again to be considered funny. Real humor doesn't need to be spread to hundreds of people on 4chan or reach internet stardom to be considered successful.

Glad to answer your three-month-old question, Wiggles.

[SolidShroom]

Internet memes spout from things that are funny, sure. I mean most people find these heavily repeated things that were once funny before they were overplayed to be a much simpler alternative to the arduous and often unsuccessful task of being originally funny. And of course, the human mind functions through repetition, so it's only human nature to find Memes funny after seeing them several times.

[CrossEyed7]

I think part of it is that most of us spend too much time on the internet and end up seeing them a lot more often.