To Meme or Not to Meme: The Contribution of Anti-Memes to Humour in the Digital Space
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Abstract
The internet meme has become a crucial part of online discourse as a mainstream vehicle for humour. The most popular form of the meme generates humour through the interplay of image and text. This manipulatable template of the text-image dynamic allows for fresh representations of existing tropes of humour. However, the anti-meme, a popular offshoot of the meme, has features that make it function differently. The anti-meme, conventionally using a popular meme-image accompanied by text, creates a comedically insipid situation consciously devoid of conventional humour. Thus, the expected creative interplay of text, image, and structure is closed off, the humour being situated not within the image macro but outside it, contained in an ironic mockery of the meme template. The anti-meme, therefore, is a crucial tool in furthering the trend of the meme template, for the current template has been rendered non-humorous. Knowledge of the anti-meme is crucial to a comprehensive understanding of how humour functions in the digital space. Through a semiotic analysis, this article explores the methods of humorous representation in the anti-meme and how it freezes the play of the particular form, necessitating constant, fluid change in the larger context of the meme universe.
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