FEATURES ILLUSTRATION JUSTIN SCHEER AND SYLVIA ATWOOD TEXT JUSTIN SCHEER DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN
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Elijah Schaffer is a C-list political pundit, one of many aspiring Rush Limbaugh-esque alt-right reactionaries. In the early afternoon of January 6, he tweeted a picture from behind a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Congressional staffers had evacuated the room only moments before, leaving an email inbox still open on the desktop monitor. The Twitter caption read, in part, “BREAKING: I am inside Nancy Pelosi’s office with the thousands of revolutionaries who have stormed the building”. Shortly thereafter, edits of the original photo began to proliferate throughout Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram, many of them changing the content visible on the desktop screen. The first one to appear on my timeline, providing satirical reprieve from a feed of solemn riot commentary, showed the digital music production program Ableton Live superimposed on the desktop monitor, the image of which is supposed to (I think) evoke the idea of a certain trap music subculture of young music producers “in the stu[dio]”. I won’t try to draw some tenuous connection between the Capitol raid and a niche trap music subculture. The meme is funny precisely because there is no connection between these images, both of which bear distinct cultural and political resonances which, in their combination, force a viewer to try to discern a substantive message, if only for an instant. The comedic climax lies in a sudden realization of the perversity of that effort, the absurdity of any imagined truth or meaning supposed to exist in the image, an instant resignation to the fact that the image is nonsense—a cognitive ‘short circuit’ of sorts. That is, at least, according to the conceptual framework of the joke articulated by late 19th-century aesthetic theorist and philosopher Theodore Lipps, a framework which I posit for the sake of argument since it might help make some sense of a particular brand of meme-based humor. The thrust of any joking remark––or, in this case, joking image––is a contrast between meaning and meaninglessness; a joke is a joke if “we attribute significance to it that has psychological necessity and then, as soon as we have done so, deny it again,” Lipps theorized. We discern truth or assume sense, however momentarily, in the joke just as one would in a non-joking remark, thereby lending the joke logical or practical bearing on or relation with reality, when one knows that it cannot contain these things. The aforementioned ‘short circuit’, the essence of the joke as one would perceive it, occurs when we become aware of this contrast, recognizing the lack of sense, truth, and practical consequence where we had thought those things to exist just a moment before, instantaneously transitioning to “the consciousness or impression of relative nothingness”.
We can extrapolate here, applying this framework generatively to the greater category of jokes to which the capitol riot memes belong, a particular brand of internet humor breaching the realm of absurdism. At issue, more specifically, is a topical or (in some capacity) relevant satire of people, institutions, or events whose ‘punchline’, as in the Ableton meme, is nonsense. Think-pieces on the topic of meme humor––or, as many of them use interchangeably, ‘Gen-Z humor’––tend to miss this point, speaking far too generally on the entirety of picture-based jokes on the internet. Usually, these articles articulate a thesis to the effect of ‘Gen-Z uses meme humor as a coping mechanism for their mass trauma,’ where, in their formulation, Gen-Z’s experience growing up in the post-9/11 era and through the 2008 Financial Crisis constitute the most pertinent of their ‘trauma’. This trauma is said to manifest in nihilistic attitudes regarding politics, economics, society, etc. They point to moments when internet social spaces, dominated by their so-called ‘Gen-Z’, satirized dire, consequential events—like the Capitol riots—with memes, arguing that ‘Gen-Z’ chooses to engage with these events on the level of humor so as to avoid earnest consideration of the future. The generational analysis employed in these arguments is sorely inaccurate; such sweeping generalizations ought to be met with skepticism, particularly when they border on generation-wide, mass psychological diagnoses. Moreover, I think there is another element to meme humor, specifically the nonsensical, absurdist meme humor at issue, that this argument misses. This is a more active, communica-
tive purpose than a mere shielding of oneself from the world and the depressive psychic damage one tends to incur by engaging with it. Namely, this humor expresses an absurdist worldview; it does not simply make fun for the sake of making fun, but also for the sake of pronouncing an understanding of the world as absurd, chaotic, and meaningless. If at the core of the comic process is a contrast between supposed meaning and actual meaninglessness, supposed truth and actual non-truth, then perhaps recasting discourse on major events, politics, and so forth, in joke form and, moreover, with absurdist overtones, is an oblique political or philosophical expression (as absurd as that might sound). This is an expression of disillusionment, an embrace of the absurd, pronouncing that politics, for instance, is in reality fundamentally nonsensical; that perhaps we have for so long lent politics “logical consequences in excess of its true content” and we are now to “deny these consequences” as we have “recognized the true nature” of politics, as Lipps might describe it. It follows, then, that politics, in its apparent entropic deterioration toward absurdity, is comical. +++ The Capitol riot was not satirized in nonsensical memes in order to cope with the ‘trauma’ of the event (it seems unlikely that the creators of these memes felt personally affected by this event), nor to avoid seriously processing the moment. Rather, these memes were precisely the medium through which one processes the event; for those who engage with this
