Saving Humor: How Memes Became Our Way to Make Fun of Life

How often do you laugh at memes? Do you share them with your friends in chats to enjoy a common situation, or just flip through the tape to cheer yourself up? If you've come to this page, you probably want to learn more about meme culture. And this is not surprising, because they have long ceased to be just pictures.

Meme culture — is not only a collection of jokes and images that spread on the Internet. It is a dynamic system that allows people to express their thoughts, feelings and reactions to events quickly and succinctly. Memes act as a kind of «digital slang», understandable to those who belong to a certain social group or community.

Memes have become a key communication tool for a generation, and their evolution can be seen as the evolution of the Internet itself. In the early 2000s, memes were quite simple, mostly static images with text. «classic» memes like «Rage Comics» or «Trollface» reflected universal emotions and spread mostly on forums, aiming to simply make you smile. Modern memes have become much more complex and dynamic: they are not only pictures, but also short videos, looped GIF animations and complex visual collages. They react to events not in days, but in minutes, and often contain several layers of meaning, understood only by «to their».

Memes — is primarily a language generation Z and generation Alpha, which grew up in the era of total digitalization. For them, memes — are an integral part of everyday communication, a way of self-expression and identification with the group. Although millennials are also active in memes, they mostly see them as a complement to communication, not its basis. Memes help these generations to quickly and succinctly convey emotions and reactions to events, creating a common cultural space where ideas can be exchanged, drawing on familiar visual images.

Memes become the most funny and viral when they relate to everyday, life situations that are absurd or painfully familiar. The humor in memes is often that they highlight paradoxical moments that happen to everyone. It can be a funny case at work, strange habits of people, uncomfortable moments called «kringem», relationship problems or everyday difficulties. Memes allow you to laugh at these situations, helping people realize that they are not alone in their life absurdities. Due to this relevance, memes are also heavily used in sticker packs in messengers, which has become very popular among teenagers as a way to communicate quickly and emotionally in correspondence.

The meme making process is extremely simple and affordable. Most often, memes are created on the basis of current events, elements of mass culture or viral videos and photos. Simple online generators are used to create them, adding text to a known template. Memes spread like wildfire through social networks and messengers. They are true «viruses» transmitted through reposts and chats, and their virality explains several key factors: emotional response (they evoke strong emotions and emotional content spreads the fastest), relevance (the most successful memes are related to current events) and simplicity (their essence can be understood in seconds, which is ideal for a fast pace of life on the Internet).

Most memes are fleeting phenomena. They arise and disappear with the event they react to, losing relevance in a few weeks. However, some memes become «classic» patterns that remain in memory for a long time and turn into «cultural heritage» of the Internet. Their visual or substantive core remains the same, while the context is constantly updated. This allows memes not just to disappear, but to evolve, passing cultural codes from one generation to another.