Before there was the internet, there was Kilroy. He sped around the world at a breakneck pace without the benefit of Facebook or Twitter, just chalk or spray paint and the unmitigated boredom of young American soldiers. On the underside of ship bunks, on bunker walls and on the Berlin Wall, he was always there — a symbol of the comedy found in dark spaces.
He could be drawn with five lines, maybe six if hair was added to his balding head. Clinging to a wall, nose dangling over the side, he simplistically summed up the resilience of the human spirit in the face of brutality. Or maybe he meant nothing at all.
No one seems to know or agree where Kilroy came from, and it’s rare to see him nowadays where the paint is fresh or the etching not weathered away. But nonetheless — he was there.
Before there were memes, there was Kilroy — an early meme in himself.
And before there was Kilroy, there was millennia of people painting pictures to convey something deeper than words.
Today, instead of gathering around a fire and joking about a mammoth hunt gone wrong, we share a blurred screengrab of a Spongebob episode — and somehow, it taps into the same instincts. Memes play a unique role in youth culture, offering insight into the smallest everyday challenges or the nebulous suffering of student loans and paying rent.
What’s in a meme?
If one tries to explain Twitter to their grandmother, they would learn memes are easier done than said.
Andrew Peck, a professor of strategic communications at Miami University of Ohio, has spent years researching and analyzing the culture and process of internet memes. He even has trouble defining it. When Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976, he meant a “unit of imitation” — like a mind virus, something passed along without thinking.
Peck said memes as we know them today aren’t so mindless. They are recurrent and repetitive, but there is personalization and variation. They tap into what the general population is thinking about.
“Memes are absolutely folklore,” Peck said. “It’s a return to an oral culture, with a lack of central ownership. It’s a chance to tell your story within a tradition while still being the center of attention for a second.”
Older generations would have just called memes “inside jokes.” Memes aren’t new, but the culture around them is. Never in history has it been so easy to see a joke, reproduce it and make it your own within seconds. From thousands of isolated bits of culture, meme culture pieces together all the things we have in common and makes an inside joke for the whole world to share.
A meme of their own
UIdaho Memes for Scott’s Tots — formerly known as UIdaho Memes for Spuddy Teens — is an inside joke for the whole University of Idaho campus to share on Facebook.
In 2016, a group of friends at UI, inspired by a meme group at UC Berkeley, decided to make their own group.
Russell Romney, one of the founding moderators of the group, said their goal was always to create “saucy, zesty, local original content.” They wanted memes that would be exclusive only to Moscow — practically unintelligible to an outsider, while bonding all Vandals past, present and future in the unique struggles of UI life.
At the start, Romney said the group was just the founders and about 50 of their friends watched as they mined the depths of campus for obscure yet relatable content. It wasn’t until real drama picked up that the group began to spread through the wider campus community.
“I made a post right before the 2018 ASUI elections comparing the candidate pairs — one was white bread and the other was garlic bread,” Romney said. “And the comment section really devolved into a huge drama. That’s around the time we hit 1,000 members.”
Romney said he thinks this pivotal moment came from the need to outlet rage, not just at the pettiness of student elections but all aspects of student life. After that, the admins saw a massive influx of student-submitted memes poking fun at everything from the preacher outside the library to Chuck Staben’s pained facial expressions.
Annika Esau, a third-year UI student, said she had never made memes before joining Scott’s Tots a couple of years ago. Now, she’s one of the top contributors to the page. She’s seen a consistent pattern in the memes that get the most play — the difficulties and suffering of being a college student.
“We like to see that everyone’s going through the same thing we are,” Esau said. “Misery loves company.”
Esau said she thinks people are more open about the darkness in their lives on the meme page because it’s easier to say sincere things to the screen in front of you than to someone who will react in real time. That’s where the absurdist, nihilistic, suicidal twist pervasive throughout meme culture comes from, she thinks — being sad, but poking fun at it and letting others admit they feel what you feel.
Dawson Hill, one of the current admins of Scott’s Tots, said the group strives to maintain a free marketplace of expression without getting outwardly nasty or rude.
While the group was not intended to be a battlefield, he thinks debate can be a positive side effect.
“We just want to see the conversation for the hell of it, really,” Hill said. “It promotes this culture of encountering different ideas, which I think is really important for today. We all take a step back and laugh at our shared experience and the dumb parts of it.”
Poisoning the well
Romney said he sometimes questions whether the meme group he helped bring into this world is doing more harm than good.
“We’ve been pretty successful relative to our mission of drinking Natty Light and making local memes in MS Paint,” Romney said. “But I wonder if we’ve kind of poisoned the well of civic conversation on campus.”
Romney points to a recent example to highlight the negativity that can stem from the group — a joke about Chick-Fil-A’s anti-gay ties where the comments turned into a firestorm. The entire spectrum of opinion was represented, Romney said, but the level of analysis was shallow. People weren’t forming nuanced opinions on the issue, but purely reacting to each other.
“At the end of the day, it’s so easy to dismiss (other perspectives) by saying ‘f*** off, it’s just a meme,’” Romney said.
Esau doesn’t like it when the comment section gets combative either, but she feels Scott’s Tots — and memes in general — can be a way to stay up to date on cultural happenings. She didn’t know about Chick-Fil-A’s shady dealings until the meme debacle, and it inspired her to dig deeper into the matter and find out more.
“I don’t know if (Scott’s Tots) really affects individual beliefs that much, because I think people are usually pretty set in their ways,” Esau said. “But it’s a fun and easy way to hear about news and opinions that’s way less depressing than the news.”
Memes are increasingly a way to be political and engage with controversy, Peck said, and it’s not inherently a bad thing. Young people feel they can’t change politics or social problems themselves, so they retreat into more private spheres where they feel they’ll be heard — and memes are a quick and dirty alternative to long, well-thought-out essays on your innermost thoughts.
“Memes really do get people thinking,” Peck said. “But of course, that means they can get people thinking about reprehensible ideas too. That combination of endless personalization and specificity is great for making memes, but bad for nuance.”
Scott’s Tots serves as one of those spheres, tapping into the junction of playfulness and politics on campus. Esau thinks the group serves an important role currently, allowing people to engage sincerely when it’s otherwise too hard to be vulnerable.
“The more rules and seriousness you impose, the more you lose that lightheartedness,” Esau said. “It would be just as tense as everyday life, which is what we’re trying to escape from.”
Peck said as with any cultural resource, memes can be used for good or bad. He thinks the true impact of meme culture will only truly be seen in hindsight.
“Culturally, we have this problem of writing things off as ‘just jokes,’” Peck said. “But they have so much value for telling us how we communicate and circulate info. They tell us who we are as a people.”
Story by Riley Haun
Illustrations by Trent Anderson
Design by Trent Anderson