‘How did the cow get out of the well? Bohat mushkil se.’ If you rolled your eyes at the above joke, it’s okay. Because lame is the new cool. This is what the massive popularity of The Sarri-alist Movement (TSM)
— an extremely popular Facebook page that hosts sarris, lame jokes, and memes — will convince you of.
In popular usage, an Internet meme is a concept in the form of text,
image or video that spreads, often virally, on the Internet. You have
almost certainly seen them, from Lolcat to Aunty Acid, if you have a Facebook account. And from the locally created Facebook pages, your friends have been posting, and reposting, memes from the massively popular
Sarcasmistan (71,000 likes), TSM (42,000 likes) and Ziada English Na Jhar Eminem Ki Olaad (186,000 likes) and others.
Globally, memes have been around since the late 1990s but in Pakistan
the growth of this pop culture movement has gained critical mass only
in the last year. The TSM was a page started by five college students, Zain Khalid Butt, Hamza Aamir, Omar Nawaz, Bilal Afzal and Qasim Ahsan, from the Lahore School of Economics (LSE).
In the course of this project, they have had to deal with issues from
hacking to moderating often vicious online debates, and were even of-
fered jobs. The idea was to produce and share ‘sarris’- extremely lame jokes — so as to “take the sarri-al culture to new heights.”
We talked to three of the founding members, Zain, Hamza and Qasim,
about TSM and the increasingly popular meme culture of Pakistan.
Q. How did you come up with the idea of the movement? Zain: The word ‘sarri’ means a lame joke, and when we were in Aitchison, we used to crack lame jokes all the time. In fact, we had quite a
following for it. The idea came to us while we were in LSE. At first, we
wanted to start a school magazine called LS-Sarri, but there were far too many inconveniences: time, printing and not to mention permissions. Hence, we settled on the idea of a Facebook page instead.
Q. How did memes start on TSM? Qasim: A sarri is something that is funny because it’s ‘unfunny’. For ex-
ample: ‘George Clooney ke bhai ka kya naam hae? Nishaat Clooney’. A meme is
an idea that spreads to a point where it is readily recognised. As such, sarris can be memes and memes can be sarris, but they aren’t the same thing.
Hamza: Personally, I think memes ruined our page. Given the option, I
would wipe them off the face of the earth. The whole idea of the page was [to have] single-line textual jokes, that people would sometimes copy off from text messages; they would hang around for thirty minutes or so,
watch other people ‘like’ their posts, count the number of girls that liked their post, and so on. But then, some users realised that pictures were
more visible to visitors. They added captions and eventually started using these rage-faces (figures and faces conveying specific emotions) to cre-
ate comic strips. An inherent flaw in this whole system was that people could, and regularly would, copy content off of websites like 9gag and
4chan, and we hated that. If we found users plagiarising, we would ban SEPTEMBER 23-29 2012
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